John Profumo
John Dennis Profumo (30 January 1915 - 9 March 2006) was a Conservative politician best known for being forced to resign as Minister for War as a result of a 1963 scandal involving a prostitute.
Broadcasting and the BBC
In 1947 Profumo joined the Conservative Central Office as the party's first head of broadcasting. There he set up a unit to monitor supposed left-wing bias at the BBC. He was also one of a group of Conservative backbenchers who campaigned to end the monopoly of the BBC and paved the way for the creation of ITV in 1955. [1]
Profumo was instructed to set up the BBC monitoring unit by Winston Churchill, who according to Profumo was convinced that the BBC was ‘honeycombed with communists’. [2] (It should be noted however that according to MI5's official historian, Churchill privately believed that communist influence in the BBC was 'very slight' and did not 'constitute a serious security danger.' [3]) Profumo told the author and journalist Michael Cockerell:
I wanted to keep an eye on left-wing bias at the BBC. I couldn’t think how we could do it. Whenever we wrote to Haley, the Director-General, he would say that we should look not just at one programme but at the whole lot. I decided to put an advertisement in the Daily Telegraph saying I was looking for long-term patients in hospital who had a radio – or if they didn’t, we would give them one. When people replied, we asked if they would agree for a small payment to listen to the programmes we chose and then write to a box number. We appointed six monitors. And each week we would have a monitoring conference at Conservative Central Office on the day the Radio Times was published and we would select the programmes to be monitored. We would say, “That chap looks left-wing” and we wanted to see whether his broadcasts were biased. I still remember one programme – about tapestries, of all things, and the commentary said something like: “To think these tapestries hang on the walls of the rich, yet they were woven in the hovels of humble peasants”. I suppose creative young people are left-wing. But as a result of our efforts we made a great deal of headway with the BBC – it had its effect. [4]
Notes
- ↑ Obituaries: John Profumo. Secretary of State for War sensationally forced out of politics after lying to the House of Commons', Independent, 11 March 2006
- ↑ Michael Cockerell, 'Broadcasters caught in crossfire of politics', Manchester Guardian Weekly, 2 April 1995
- ↑ Duncan Gardham, 'BBC wanted more vetting from MI5', Daily Telegraph, 28 May 2010/
- ↑ Michael Cockerell, Live from Number 10: The Inside Story of Prime Ministers and Television (London: Faber and Faber, 1988) p.7
