This is not about what’s best for broadcasting: it is that today’s Tory party hates the channel’s progressive output
Margaret Thatcher was right. When her more ideologically charged followers sought to privatise Channel 4 in the heyday of 1980s free-market capitalism, the patron saint of flogging off public assets said no: she was correctly advised that such a move would fatally undermine its public service duty and trash its standards.
It is fashionable these days to claim Boris Johnson’s Tories lean left on the economy and right on culture: their planned selloff of Channel 4 is totemic of how true blue ideology remains king on both fronts. While ministers define their patriotism by the size of the Union Jack in their living rooms, they prepare an act of gross cultural vandalism, with dozens of British TV production companies facing collapse.
