The American Spectator

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Clearly, on the evidence of this sort of fare, the BBC is infested with a lot of overpriced help with no more taste than Darcy the dachshund. Considering what he was working with, Thompson, as he hemmed, hawed, stuttered, and squirmed his way through what was probably the worst interview experience of his career, had about as much chance Thursday against Baroness James as an armadillo has against a steel-belted radial.

Mrs. James sniffed: "The BBC seems like a large, unwieldy ship, taking on more and more cargo, recruiting more officers, all very comfortably cabined, at salaries far greater than their predecessors, and with a crew somewhat discontented and mutinous; the ship sinking close to the plimsoll line, and the customers feeling they've paid too much for the journey, not sure where they're going or indeed who's the captain."

Just so.

As the Telegraph put it Friday, Mrs. James said what countless Brits have been feeling about the BBC for some time. They suggested cheering could be heard throughout the land. In a Sunday editorial the Telegraph hinted Mrs. James's next novel might be entitled "Death by Interview":

What a woman! What a life! In a single slot on Radio 4's Today programme, Baroness James reminded us with shocking force of the things we have lost: common sense, decency, the right to inquire after the truth.

Perhaps one would expect the conservative Telegraph to say things like this. But the press coverage of Mrs. James' bravura performance was widespread and almost uniformly supportive of her. She was the buzz in the UK for several days. Not even the Guardian," England's NYT, could find anything snarky to say. And the Guardian, along with most of the literary left, has consistently panned Mrs. James's novels for having, in words that signify here, too many red-state values. (The pleasure conservatives can take from this is the literary left is made up mostly of writers who sell a lot fewer books than Mrs. James does.)

Does this mean that the UK, much further down the road of the nanny-state than America, has a future after all? Can we now sing, "There'll Always Be an England" and mean it? Can the sceptered isle avoid being totally run over by hustlers and yobs? Is Mrs. James the real voice of Britain rather than Cool Britannia and the other abominations of the last decade or so?

It's too soon to tell. And in any case this would be an awful lot to hang on a radio interview, no matter how finely done. But Mrs. James demonstrated that the civilized, stiff-upper-lip England so many of us appreciated, and which now appears to be, to coin an expression, gone with the wind, has not been entirely stamped out.

It's unlikely that at 89 Mrs. James will want to pursue a new career as a talking head. I for one hope she's spending most of her time on a new novel. But if she'd like to take some time away from her fictional world to come over here and strap on Obama or David Axelrod, that would be fine with me. She could doubtless leave our PBS crowd with their organic tote-bags over their heads.

topics:
Political Correctness, P.D. James, BBC