Donald Tump’s war is going to bring us more misery. Talking to the governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, recently, I was struck by the melancholy with which he reminded me that only weeks before, he’d expected a series of interest rate cuts. We think of someone in his job as sitting in a grand office in the City watching screens. In fact, Andrew spends much of his time charging round the country, talking to businesses, taking the temperature. And in every way except meteorologically, it’s falling.
One beneficiary of this crisis may well be the PM. I once shared the consensus view that the May elections will bring on the leadership challenge; in a small way, I might have helped shaped it. Now, Keir Starmer’s future depends on the war: if we are still in a tit-for-tat demolition of global energy supplies and a deep sense of world crisis, changing leader may simply seem impossibly self-indulgent.
Beeb tech
The BBC has made another big mistake. I say this as a former employee and, from the outside, a friend. But replacing Tim Davie, a former Pepsi executive and marketing director who resigned last year, with Matt Brittin, a former Google executive, as director-general will not end well.
It’s easy to understand the thinking. In a world of digital streaming and relentless online evolution, someone who comes from Big Tech seems a good fit. I have never met Brittin. He is clearly a high-flyer. He was a consultant at McKinsey, then commercial director of Trinity Mirror, before holding a series of senior jobs at Google, latterly in charge of its operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He tangled with the Commons Public Accounts Committee in 2012 over Google’s reluctance to pay tax in the UK; MPs attacked the company for being unethical, even “evil”. But that is not my beef.
Brittin appears to know little about journalism; yet if the BBC is not, first, a news and current affairs organisation, it is nothing. I never got the impression that Davie, a cheerful fellow, much liked journalists, referring to them dryly as “the talent”. In his time, the BBC lost a string of experienced specialists, particularly overseas ones, whose collective understanding and wisdom was irreplaceable. It became mired in journalistic scandals and controversies I suspect the old guard of proper hacks and hack-managers might have kept it clear of. The crisp judgements of people who’d spent years reporting science, religious affairs, defence, or whatever, has been replaced by jellied euphemism.
I fear a repeat. We will be told, as we always are, that the list of applicants was quite remarkably impressive. But I wonder. In our intemperate public culture, haven’t we made the job of director-general impossibly stressful? I know of qualified and senior outside people who watched the monstering of Davie, thought “not on your nelly”, and didn’t apply.
Well, the decision has been taken. To mitigate it, the BBC must appoint a deputy or head of news who is a proper, experienced journalist. They won’t thank me for saying so, but I would go for Nick Robinson or Kirsty Wark.
Chasing Amy
Another top job that looks almost impossible is Starmer’s chief of staff. In this case, it’s more about whether outside candidates believe the Prime Minister would take advice. Yet it’s one workplace where you can make a huge difference. Amy Richards was brought in as political director in September, and I hear nothing but praise. She’s credited with winning over scores of hostile MPs. Given what’s coming next, she may be the most significant appointment Morgan McSweeney ever made.
Shattered visage
The coincidence of reading a new biography of WH Auden around the same time I met with David Hockney reminded me of a story. When the artist was younger, he drew the fissured landscape of the elderly poet’s portrait, and pondered: “If that’s what his face looks like… what must his testicles look like?” The tale may be apocryphal, but it got me thinking about ageing faces. Auden was perhaps an extreme example of the effect of a lifetime of smoking – though Hockney has survived that – plus heavy drinking, and an enthusiasm for Benzedrine. He was 66 when he died, but looked older.
That’s as nothing, however, to workers of previous generations. I’ve seen photographs of Highland crofters in the 19th century, and farm workers and factory workers, who seem as old as time – deeply lined, weather-beaten and whitened – but who, records suggest, were probably only in their forties. Today’s relatively cosseted middle-class lives produce smooth, soft faces – lathered in face creams and often surgically tightened – which have perhaps never existed on the planet before. They may be the reward for good living, but they’re uninteresting, I bet, to draw or paint.
[Further reading: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg and the death of the Hollywood dream]
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This article appears in the 25 Mar 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Easter Special
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Subscribe here to commentThe BBC Needs an Outsider to Revive the Lost Art of Journalism
Andrew Marr’s lament that the BBC has replaced expert analysis with “jellied euphemism” begs a simple question: what world is he living in? For over three decades, the deterioration of journalistic standards has been glaringly obvious. The primary affliction of our media is rarely deliberate falsehood, but rather a pervasive incompetence and a steady erosion of editorial rigor.
Undeniably, the modern world has grown vastly more complex. Yet, instead of rising to the challenge—instead of deploying the precise, economical prose that once defined the craft—the industry has resorted to dumbing down its output. In the pursuit of easy consumption, accuracy and clarity have become the ultimate casualties.
This is precisely why a departure from the BBC’s long-standing reliance on the Peter Principle is long overdue. For too long, brilliant reporters have been promoted into managerial incompetence. Bringing in an outsider—someone unburdened by the myth of the Corporation’s “sacrosanct” standards—might be exactly what is required to disrupt this complacency and revive the true, rigorous skills of the trade.