Snappy retort

As a mother it’s often difficult to find time to blog. By the time you get round to it, the subject you’ve been mulling over in your head has gone off the boil. 

You guessed it. We’re talking Andrea Leadsom. 

The entire media seemed to have been pretending that when Andrea Leadsom blurted out the dreaded ‘p’ word, she was actually demanding that the BBC assumes a nationalistic agenda with immediate effect. National anthem before every news bulletin.

No-one said what I, as a mother, thought was quite obvious; that the she was provoked by the unrelenting negativity that pours forth from the BBC day after day, and that the ‘p’ word was goaded out of her by Emily Maitlis in a hostile interview, which turned into the proverbial final straw.

Maitlis’s snappy retort left an open goal that was begging for some robust home truths about the BBC’s attitude problem, but instead all we got from the media was a load of manufactured outrage directed at Leadsom for insulting the BBC by casting aspersions on its world renowned impartiality, and for making scandalous demands of the BBC; that it must adopt a nationalistic, xenophobic, Tory-toff agenda -how very dare she.

Anyway I thought the story had been put to bed, but it was plucked from its slumber by the BBC because of an article by ex BBC exec Mark Damazer in the Thunderer section of the Times, (£) which I understand is reserved for that kind of thing. 

The BBC even announced it - as news - in the early morning news bulletin. 

Mr. Damazer isn’t a fan of Andrea Leadsom. 

“It is only just over a year ago that she was deemed to have done outstandingly in a different BBC TV environment. Armed with a bunch of prefabricated pro-Brexit lines, she was pronounced the Brexit star in a mass verbal punch-up at the Wembley Arena — optimistically labelled by the BBC The Great Debate. Within a fortnight, the Conservative Party was teetering on the edge of making her PM. Then came this paper’s celebrated interview in which Leadsom mused on how motherhood gave her political insights unavailable to Theresa May.”

His views on the BBC, the EU and so on are quite clear too. 

 “The broadcasters are there to test arguments, allow multiple points of view to be heard and questioned, and to report the unfortunate and doubtless irritating consequences that derive from the different view of Europe to hers held by governments of the other 27 EU countries. By doing this the BBC provides huge dollops of “soft power” for the UK — which may not be its primary purpose but is decidedly more useful than becoming part of the government’s Brexit team.

Mark Damazer CBE

Needless to say, once again, the drubbing is below the line. 376 comments at the time of writing. Subscribing to the Times is well worth it, if only for that.

Don’t forget Andrea Leadsom’s doomed bid for P.M. 

Maybe her ‘motherhood’ remark was a cack-handed declaration of her personal stake in the future. Maybe she was making an offensive jibe at Theresa May’s childlessness. 

Maybe she thought that absence of fecundity was a guarantee of reckless, selfish disregard for future generations. Who knows? Too many sentences beginning with maybe and you begin to sound like Jeremy Corbyn.

Perhaps Theresa May’s non-motherhood is somehow connected with her inability to shed tears in public, the singular, non-negotiable quality currently demanded of its leaders. Maybe a mum is what is needed, after all? Or, if the the Prime Minister needs to behave as the quintessential mother figure, maybe childlessness is a guarantee of undivided, maternal devotion to the nation.

In its own way, that principle certainly works for this blogger.