• “Few toffs! Great start” tweeted Rupert Murdoch when the cabinet was announced, echoing the message dutifully conveyed by spreads in his own Times and the Daily Mail supposedly showing a team stuffed with self-made stars from humble backgrounds. Yet half the revamped line-up were privately educated (including three of the four most senior ministers), and among them are alumni of Winchester (John Whittingdale), Cheltenham Ladies’ (Amber Rudd), St Paul’s (George Osborne), Charterhouse (Jeremy Hunt) and two Etonians (David Cameron, Oliver Letwin, plus Boris Johnson attending “political cabinet”). How unlike normally sceptical Rupert to naively accept government spin! But then his notion of “toffs” has always been as wayward as his definition of “the Establishment” (ie as something that doesn’t include him).
• Monkey sadly wasn’t invited to Evgeny Lebedev’s glitzy birthday party last weekend, but an amiable champagne soak who was whispers that the guests included, not only Emma Watson and Salma Hayek, but also David Cameron and George Osborne (plus, more curiously, Tristram Hunt). No doubt they were there to convey their thanks for the support of the birthday boy’s papers: the London Evening Boris, sorry Standard, which backed the Conservatives alone, and the Independent, which hoped for another Tory-Lib Dem coalition – the latter paper providing more of a challenge for the young tycoon, since its editor Amol Rajan has often signalled left-of-centre sympathies (as in a column passionately defending Ed Miliband against the Mili-bashers) and, after the election leader appeared, pointedly sought to underline its kind words about the Lib Dems and harsh words about the Tories. And Boris Johnson? Not spotted, but as someone who has been a holiday guest at Lebedev’s villa in Italy (with flights paid!) the Mayor/MP may be counting on showing his personal appreciation during another sun-kissed sojourn in Umbria.
• At a conference last week, ITV’s head of sport Niall Sloane reportedly berated his BBC counterpart Barbara Slater on the grounds that the Beeb puts sport too far “down the pecking order”, a situation he attributed to “bluestockings” at the top of the corporation not recognising its importance. Happily, there’s no risk of any such bluestocking takeover at vibrantly virile if viewer-shedding ITV: it boasts just one woman out of nine (the head of comms) on Adam Crozier’s “management team”, and one woman out of eight (a non-exec still in her first year) on Archie Norman’s board. Commissioning? Besides television supremo Peter Fincham and head of ITV Studios Kevin Lygo, blokes run current affairs, drama, factual, news and of course sport.
• Always eager to help, Monkey has a suggestion on how the BBC might soften John Whittingdale’s attitude to it ahead of charter and licence fee negotiations: a lionising drama based on his role during the Gibraltar crisis of summer 2013, when the then chairman of the culture select committee was visiting the Rock on other business (a committee inquiry into gambling, though this may have been just a cover story, or “legend” in spook lingo) but according to the Spectator was asked to nose around, report back and perhaps do more as No 10’s hush-hush envoy - and whatever he got up to, the raging tensions over fishing rights and border checks swiftly reverted to a normal, containable level of friction after his arrival. Two options are possible: a docudrama explicitly celebrating his feat of single-handedly preventing war between the UK and Spain, working title Whittingdale Undercover: Mission Gib; or a more 007-like adventure thriller where the genial panama-hatted hero is ostensibly fictional (though those in the know notice that he is, like the cult sec, an unlikely devotee of heavy metal) and his activities range from infiltrating militant Spanish fishermen to organising a double honeytrap by a female MI6 agent that enables him to blackmail the prime minister and king in Madrid into backing down.
• Broadcast magazine reports much tutting from factual producers about the seven months taken to appoint Patrick Holland to the post of BBC head of documentaries that Emma Willis (not to be confused with the Big Brother hostess unless something very surreal is going on) vacated in October - but in Monkey’s view that only goes to show what drama queens these documentary types paradoxically are. It can, after all, be much tougher for those working in fluffier areas: think of the long wait for the unveiling of a new director of the BBC Proms, a position that has been up for grabs now for a potentially record-breaking 15 months (Roger Wright, who combined running the Proms and Radio 3, said he was quitting in March 2014), helped by the BBC only getting round to advertising the vacancy in February this year.
• Judging by the photos that emerged of David Cameron’s new cabinet, Lady Stowell, the leader of the Lords and Lord Privy Seal, is fascinatingly seated only a few places away from John Whittingdale, the Thatcherite new culture secretary whose past statements about the BBC were much-quoted last week. Previously, the pair have come together when on opposite sides: Whittingdale had been chairman of the culture, media and sport select committee since 2005 before his elevation, while the pre-ermine Tina Stowell held senior communications posts defending the BBC (head of comms for successive chairmen and the governors/trust, 2003-08, head of corporate affairs 2008-10) when Whittingdale’s committee were scrutinising it and not infrequently berating it. So the bodies in between may be handy to conceal Stowell’s muttering and ferocious scribbling if Whittingdale does turn out to be the Beeb Basher in Chief whose appointment (“a victory for sanity”) the Daily Mail huzzahed as a declaration of overdue “war on the BBC”. Maybe she could “lose” the Privy Seal if he comes up with legislative plans clearly designed to crush the corporation?
• This article was amended on 18 May 2015 to remove an item about Twitter that contained misleading information
