What the new culture secretary needs to do next

As Karen Bradley replaces John Whittingdale as Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport, it’s time to act decisively on a number of key media issues, writes Raymond Snoddy

For a few minutes it looked as if the new Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport was going to be a really interesting appointment that would go to someone with at least some qualifications for the job.

The word was that the top culture post was going to Karren Brady – Baroness Brady, vice-chairman of West Ham FC. Apart from her detailed knowledge of football, she knows her way around television through her role in The Apprentice and has an intimate knowledge of publishing through her soft porn years working with David Sullivan.

Alas it was not to be. The “appointment” was a mishearing, a joke or a genuine misunderstanding.

Instead we have got Karen Bradley (pictured) who has had no known public association with culture, sport or the media – although she is a Manchester City fan, reads A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens every year and has a marked taste for fictional detectives such as Morse and Rebus.

There is not a trace of interest in any of the media issues of the day such as the future of the BBC, the possible privatisation of Channel 4 or whether self-regulation of the press under IPSO should continue.

She is, however, a qualified accountant and tax consultant who used to work for both Deloitte and KPMG.

Naturally, she has already been criticised and even mocked by members of the culture community and even leading advertising figures worried about bans on fat and sugar promotion.

Why did Karen Bradley come to the Cabinet table as Culture Secretary – the ninth to hold the post in the past decade?

She was a woman and Prime Minister Theresa May was desperately looking for women to serve in her Cabinet.

In the coup against the privileged public school boys of the Cameron administration she also had the great advantage of being a publican’s daughter educated at her local comprehensive. Seven of the eight women in the May Cabinet were state educated.
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Most important of all she worked closely with the Prime Minister as a junior minister at the Home Office and like her boss she was a Remainer.

According to Sir John Randall, the former government deputy chief whip Karen Bradley was a very effective Home Office minister in policy areas such as modern-day slavery.

As for the sacking of John Whittingdale, where do you start?

He was a man. He went to Winchester. He was a modest Brexit fan and who knows what the High Church of England vicar’s daughter made of his interesting sexual life and the brushing acquaintance with a very non-political sort of whip.

Whittingdale was toast already even before you ask whether he was any good at his job.

The answer was no, of course, but that might have had little bearing on the loss of the red boxes and the ministerial car.

Culture minister Ed Vaizey was very good at his job, had a genuine knowledge of, and affection for, cultural matters and tried to promote a vision of digital Britain and the importance of the creative industries.

The mystery is why he was overlooked for the top job after six years. The answer seemed to be Vaizey insisted on behaving like a human being rather than always toeing the party line and even making jokes about the Tories.

In the present puritanical atmosphere his gender and his education at St Pauls would have been enough on its own to do for him.

One of the few things that can be said about the change of regime at DCMS is that the dangerous experiment of appointing people who know something about the subject is now officially at an end.

There was some initial excitement when Whittingdale was appointed Culture Secretary. He had 10 years of chairing the Commons Culture committee that had produced a number of perfectly reasonable reports.

Big mistake. The cross-party nature of the “reasonable” reports had merely masked the free market ideology that runs through Whittingdale like a stick of rock.

He was shaping up to be the worst – as in most damaging – of all the Culture Secretaries and was only prevented from taking the title by having his chain pulled by another fellow public-school educated back-bencher, George Osborne.

The imposition on the BBC of the £700 million cost of free licence fees for the over 75s will cause considerable damage to the BBC even though it is now being phased in. When Whittingdale was in charge of the policy it was going to be imposed immediately and there would be no negotiation.

Lest we forget the former Culture Secretary would also have liked to create an even smaller BBC where the Corporation would not have been able to schedule popular programmes against ITV on Saturday evenings.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary Whittingdale never lost his interest in privatising Channel 4 because he thought he knew better than almost everyone who has looked at the issue, and doesn’t have a financial interest in the outcome.

So welcome to the new Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport and her near total lack of prior knowledge on the broad range of human and business activity she is now responsible for.

Her civil servants will already have brought out the briefing documents. She will be able to listen to the arguments with a fresh pair of ears and without the baggage of preconceptions.

It would be good if she learned very early on that within culture media and sport – with the exception of the England football team – she will be presiding over some of the most important growth industries for the future of the UK.

She can fix a few things quickly and endear herself to the BBC and all those who worry about direct government interference in the media, by making sure appointments to the executive board for the nations go through independent processes.

Karen Bradley should also look at the DCMS brief on Channel 4 and remove the present debilitating uncertainty facing the channel by ruling out privatisation at least for the foreseeable future.

Now is the time to act decisively to brush away the male Whittingdale fug and then push on to a more creative future.

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