Needless to say, nothing remotely like Ann Clwyd's attacks on multiple ITV companies emerged from the Labour Party after Tony Blair became leader the following year (and this hasn't changed back: even the present Labour leadership adheres to policies on broadcasting and media which would once have been considered the stuff of the Mont Pelerin Society - in this respect, the apparent rebirth of socialism is, if judged by the criteria of Attlee and the Arts Council and the Third Programme, a complete and utter red herring). Indeed, when Blair said that he "almost stood outside the Labour Party and looked at it and thought: if I were* an ordinary person looking at British politics, how would I want the party to develop?", there is no argument at all that the acceptance of deregulated commercial broadcasting was a big part of what he had in mind.
Agreed that it would be wholly unthinkable for the Times to run an article like the Alan Hamilton one now. It's become much more in line with everything else associated with it, to say the very least.
For those remotely interested, the Earl of Stockton who wrote that letter to the Times was Harold Macmillan's grandson, who inherited the title directly as the former PM's only son, who was also an MP, had died young; the grandson was never an MP but was later a Conservative MEP in my own region, in line with his grandfather's initially and indeed ultimately thwarted ambitions for Britain (Stockton was of course Macmillan's first constituency and, thus, a central site in the development of One Nation Conservatism and the aristocratic social conscience: for those even more remotely interested, last year the Tories lost their seat in Stockton but gained another seat elsewhere on Teesside).
*Actually I am pretty certain he said "if I was", being a semi-literate media creation, but I am giving him the benefit of the doubt here
Last edited by Araminta Kane on 4 February 2018 2:26am - 2 times in total