This year's Correspondents Look Ahead on Radio 4 lacked its long-term host Owen Bennett-Jones.
I've always liked OB-J, and was going to joke that his eternal prophecy about Imran Khan becoming PM of Pakistan, made year in and year out, actually came true last year, but unfortunately the freelance BBC World Service host didn't get the gig this time.
I wonder whether that was in any way connected to the coruscating piece he wrote for the London Review of Books just before Christmas, in which he delivered elegant punch after elegant punch to the BBC's solar plexus and left it reeling.
It's a remarkable read, and I'll post a few extracts from it over the next few posts.
This is whistleblowing at its finest. (Ignore the fact that he's obviously a typical BBC Remainer).
It obviously didn't go down well with the BBC as below the LRB article there's a snarky right-to-reply comment from Jamie Angus, Director of the BBC World Service, which goes so far as to say that Owen "should have known better" and to damn his "careless remarks" for endangering BBC journalists, provoking an aggrieved OB-J to reply:
To suggest that my citing publicly available and widely discussed information about the BBC’s relationship with the state puts staff at physical risk is ridiculous – a flailing attempt to sidestep scrutiny.Time to renew my subscription to the leftist London Review of Books.
