I AM SURE that at his interview with Mr. Sidney
Bernstein Lord Hailsham presented the case of a noisy minority of Conservative back-benchers (that Granada TV has displayed anti-Tory bias) with considerable skill, but I doubt if he really took it very seriously himself. He has, after all, suffered in the past himself from the jealousy of dim and inferior politicians and from the megalo- mania of the Whips and the party machines. He used to be a regular performer on In the News until the BBC cravenly surrendered to party pres- sure and rationed the appearances of any one MP on the programme to an annual figure accept- able to the party headquarters. So Lord Hailsham knows perfectly well that TV appearances are a difficult business, and that it is impossible to share them out amongst all the members of a party like so many jobs for the boys. Although he is a loyal party man, he must have got some sardonic satisfaction from this business; he was the leading Tory opponent of Commercial Tele- vision, while the MPs who complained of Granada were just those people who were most anxious to introduce it in order to bring 'freedom' into broadcasting and to counteract the insidious Left- wing propaganda of the BBC! The fact remains that a nasty smear has been set in motion; Mr. Bernstein can take care of himself, and the ITA is unlikely to be impressed by the quality of the 'evidence' produced in support of the charges of bias, but it seems highly improbable that any of Granada's programmes would have been ob- jected to if Mr. Bernstein had not been well known as a supporter of the Labour Party. I am sorry that Mr. Leather, whose voice rarely takes on so whining a quality, saw fit, in a letter to The Times, to make the smear explicit and direct, claiming that he had been invited on a Monday to appear on the following Wednesday, and that the shortness of this notice was an example of bias. The fact (which he mentions) that Mr. Leather was invited as a substitute for the first choice, who had been asked the previous Friday, rather weakens his case, and the fact (which he does not mention) that the programme in question was Youth Wants to Know prompts one to ask how much notice Mr. Leather needs to answer questions about Conservative policy posed by fifteen-year-old schoolchildren. But Mr. Leather, and all the other clamourers in the Tory Party, were effectively dealt with in The Times's ad- mirably sensible and forthright leader the next day, in which it advised them, in effect, to behave in a rather more adult fashion. And I don't sup- pose that Granada's lively producers will be cowed by these wild attacks on their professional integrity.
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