Boris Johnson said he believed the BBC would “be around for a long time to come”, in a view contrasting with that of his culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, who has questioned whether the corporation will exist a decade from now.
“The BBC has been around for a very long time, it’s a great national institution, I’ve no doubt that it will be around for a long time to come,” Johnson told GB News, in one of several media interviews before his speech on Wednesday to the Tory party conference, in Manchester.
It could be seen as a mild rebuke to Dorries, who a day previously had questioned the long-term existence of the corporation, accusing it of endemic institutional bias, class privilege and nepotism.
Asked at a conference fringe event if there would still be a licence fee in 10 years, Dorries replied: “Will the BBC still be here in 10 years? I don’t know. You can’t look into the future. It is a very competitive environment.”
She told a live edition of the Telegraph podcast Chopper’s Politics: “You have got Amazon Prime, Netflix and other bods coming down the line. This younger generation that are coming through, they certainly watch their television in a very different way to how my generation watched its TV, so who knows where we will be.”
She also linked the BBC’s next licence fee settlement to its ability to attract a more socially diverse workforce, and what she called “an impartiality problem”.
“The perspective from the BBC is that they will get a settlement, and then we’ll talk about how they’re going to change. But my perspective is, tell me how you’re going to change and then you get a settlement.
“We’re having a discussion about how the BBC can become more representative of the people who pay the licence fee, and how it can be more accessible to people from all backgrounds, not just people whose mum and dad worked there.”
The last comment prompted a vigorous reaction from a number of BBC staff, including the newsreader Huw Edwards, who tweeted: “I know one spectacularly successful @BBCNews presenter whose parents were never on the BBC’s books and who made it ‘despite’ his state and non-Oxbridge education. Fancy that!”
In one of his earlier interviews on Tuesday, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Johnson had a slightly testy exchange with the presenter Nick Robinson, who at one point said: “Prime minister, stop talking, we are going to have questions and answers, not where you merely talk, if you wouldn’t mind.”
At the end of the interview, Johnson said: “It’s very kind of you to let me talk ... I thought that was the point of inviting me on your show.”
