"But can I just look at some elephants please?"

 

Sarah Vine, wife of former Environment Secretary Michael Gove, tweeted this tonight: 

Tuned in to watch a bit of David Attenborough but am now being subjected to propaganda. Yes, I know: humanity is an evil plague on the planet. But can I just look at some elephants please? #PerfectPlanet

Of course, the answer to Sarah's question is, 'No, you can't just look at some elephants. This is the BBC'.

Wonder if Michael was watching and felt the same way?

Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before

 

It's a strange sensation, dipping into the Sunday papers online and finding The Mail on Sunday going heavily with the BBC Teach telling primary school-aged children that the there are 'over 100 genders'. 

Their political editor Glen Owen has a piece on it, as does columnist Sarah Vine (Michael Gove's missus). The first is headlined: 

BBC lockdown home-schooling programme tells 9-year-olds there are 'over 100 genders' and shows kids talking to adults about 'bi-gender', 'genderqueer' and 'pansexual' identities

and the second is headlined: 

BBC home-schooling programme that tells 9-year-olds there are 'over 100 genders' is a masterclass in indoctrination... on the licence fee

Now, you'll have probably guessed the 'strange' bit about this: The  'over 100 genders' BBC Teach video is old news, very widely reported two years ago. Most of you will probably remember it.

It's something we wrote about in September 2019 and The Times covered it too. And so did the MoS's sister paper the Daily Mail. 

So why is the Mail on Sunday bringing this up as if it's a brand new story now? 

I assumed that it was perhaps being broadcast again on BBC TV as part of the BBC's much-publicised lockdown school programming, but the article quotes the BBC saying it isn't and itself says it's only online. 

It's still just available on the BBC Teach website, online, unchanged, just as it was when we first wrote about it in 2019. 

So, the Mail on Sunday is just recycling an old story it seems - unless its journalists were completely unaware of it till now.

Still, it's a good story, and one that always makes its readers fume at the BBC's 'wokery'. I'm sure they'll be stirred up all over again when they wake up this morning - those that aren't rolling their eyes at being fed old news that is! 

Update: However 'old news' it is, it's driving a lot of anti-BBC comment on the #DefundtheBBC hashtag on Twitter. It's striking a chord again.

*******

Glen Owen is on a roll, incidentally. He's also got a piece about a new BBC Three documentary 'DIY Trans Teens' which he says (a) "reveals how children can buy sex-change drugs" and (b) "will  publicise the work of a doctor who has been struck off in UK" but "who now has an online firm overseas  that offers gender-change drugs to people" - drugs the effects of which "are unknown and may include long-term harm". He makes it sound irresponsible. Whether or not it is, only time will tell because the programme apparently isn't yet finished. 

You are what you Tweet

Why does Michael Gove and his wife own a copy of a book by David Irving, one of the most notorious Holocaust deniers on earth https://t.co/53xI6UFyBa

— Owen Jones🌹 (@OwenJones84) May 3, 2020

Talking of bookcases and their contents (as we were the other day) a Twitter spat is raging over the contents of a bookcase in the Sarah Vine - Michael Gove household.

The Twitterati is (are (?)) cruelly critical of the preponderance of political biographies, autobiographies and memoirs and furious about the inclusion in the Vine/Gove library of Atlas Shrugged. 

Owen Jones is gloating over the sighting of a copy of a book by 'holocaust denier and discredited historian' David Irving.

Is Sarah Vine deliberately flouting her bookcase now for the sole purpose of provoking Owen Jones? (confidently assuming he’ll hoist himself on his own opportunistic petard) 

Be careful not to be too smug though. Those books are suspiciously pristine and organised. Normal bookcases are higgledy-piggledy and don’t look like libraries. Or do they? Maybe it’s just my house.

Sarah Vine’s Twitter thread is ablaze.

Update: More exciting news on the bookcase front. Mary Harrington in UnHerd

Here is a taster: :

The ballyhoo over Michael Gove’s bookshelf, as shared by Sarah Vine, has rapidly sorted into two camps representing the two familiar varieties of liberalism that make up the contemporary culture war. 

On the one hand, stand the defenders of Freeze Peach. I haven’t checked recently, but if Brendan O’Neil and Toby Young haven’t yet published articles defending Gove’s bookshelf in the name of Freeze Peach it’s only because they’re still working on them. On the other, we find the usual proponents of Banning Bad Ideas In The Name Of Progress. 

So far, so predictable. But both sides in this stupid argument are barking up the wrong tree. The real, hidden culture war is over the extent to which it’s proper to arrange our bookshelves as an expression of our public selves, and to what extent this is an act of insufferable vanity. 

On the one side are the people who carefully arrange the most recondite titles on their sitting room bookshelves, to impress visitors with their highbrow interests, while the trash paperbacks get tucked away upstairs. Anyone who does this is guaranteed to scan your bookshelves furtively when visiting and judge you on what they see.

She's. Not. Wrong.

Mrs. Michael. Gove. (are we allowed to say that?) Isn't. Holding. Back. Tonight:

Sarah Vine: This. Audience. Is. A. Total. Labour. Stitch. Up. Well done BBC, you've really outdone yourself this time.

She's. Not. Wrong.