The Edition: BBC in crisis, the Wes Streeting plot & why 'flakes' are the worst
Best of the Spectator
The Spectator
4.4 • 785 Ratings
🗓️ 14 November 2025
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Can the BBC be fixed? After revelations of bias from a leaked dossier, subsequent resignations and threats of legal action from the US President, the future of the corporation is the subject of this week’s cover piece.
Host William Moore is joined by The Spectator’s commissioning editor, Lara Brown, arts editor, Igor Toronyi-Lalic, and regular contributor, Melanie McDonagh.
They also discuss the drama of this week’s Westminster coup plot, and Melanie’s new book about why Catholicism attracted unlikely converts throughout the twentieth century.
Plus: what’s the most bizarre excuse a friend has used to back out of a social engagement?
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Subscribe to The Spectator in our Black Friday Flash Sale and you'll get 12 weeks of the magazine, along with full access to all of our online content, for just £12. Not only that, but we'll also send you a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label Whiskey worth £30 on the shops, absolutely free. |
| 0:18.3 | Hurry though, this ridiculously good offer, ends on the 1st of December. |
| 0:22.6 | Go to www. |
| 0:25.3 | Spectator.com.ukuk forward slash Friday. |
| 0:40.7 | Hello and welcome to the edition podcast from The Spectator. |
| 0:47.3 | I'm William Moore, the Spectator's Features Editor, and the latest issue of the magazine, has just gone off stone. |
| 0:52.1 | To talk about what's in it, I'm joined by Lara Brown, the Spectator's commissioning editor, |
| 0:55.3 | Igor Toroni Lalik, our arts editor, and Menly McDonough, the journalist and writer and frequent spectator contributor. |
| 1:01.3 | We're going to start by talking about Rod Liddell's cover piece for the magazine this week, |
| 1:06.4 | because he writes about the BBC, and he diagnoses what he sees is the problem with the BBC, which is a |
| 1:14.0 | culture of denial and a complete reluctance for BBC staff to recognise their bias. Well, |
| 1:21.4 | Lara, since you wrote an excellent sidebar to go with Rod, I'd love to start by asking you |
| 1:24.9 | what you made of his piece and his argument. And I mean, do you think that he's correct to say that there is this culture of denial in the BBC? |
| 1:32.6 | And do you think it's possible that it could be changed? |
| 1:34.8 | I think Rod's completely right about the culture of denial. As he sort of lays out the story |
| 1:38.7 | of the several days of resignations, it becomes clear that the BBC, I think potentially |
| 1:43.0 | have no aware of their own bias. |
| 1:45.6 | My favourite comment on his is they understand bias is an abstract idea, but they don't |
| 1:49.3 | understand that bias is them. And I get the impression that a lot of junior people in the BBC |
| 1:53.4 | are people that he worked with accepted so many sort of dominant ideologies that they just didn't |
| 1:58.0 | understand could be reasonably rebutted, like Brexit, like trans, like mask mandates, that they just didn't understand could be reasonably rebutted like Brexit like trans |
| 2:02.5 | like mask mandates that they had no sense that fair play would involve platforming both sites and |
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