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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The year is 1964: the Conservatives, having been in power for more than a decade, face a difficult election battle against a resurgent Labour, led by a politician who rose up the ranks as the preferred choice of the party’s left establishment but who is increasingly identified with its right flank.
The most important media organisation in the country is the BBC, and its most valuable bit of intellectual property is one of its newest: Doctor Who.
The year is 2024. The Conservatives, having been in power for more than decade, face a difficult election battle against a resurgent Labour, led by a politician who rose up the ranks as the preferred choice of the party’s left establishment but who is increasingly identified with its right flank.
The most important media organisation in the UK is the BBC, and its most valuable bit of intellectual property is one of its oldest: Doctor Who, which celebrated its 60th anniversary last year.
On election night, when the country tunes in to find out how Rishi Sunak’s July 4 gamble has played out, ministers, MPs and pundits coming into the BBC’s headquarters will be ushered in past the family show’s paraphernalia. The programme’s fortunes are a guide to how the institution that will do much to shape those of the parties is changing.
The latest Doctor Who premiere was the BBC’s most successful drama that week — with a little over 4mn viewers. For context, when the Conservatives entered office in 2010, the show managed the same thing with 10mn viewers.
The final election debate of 2010, also on the BBC, between Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, got 8.4mn viewers. The final election debate in 2019, between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, scored just 4.4mn.
The audiences for both reflect a deeper truth: that televised set-piece events reach fewer people than ever before. The paradox is that the BBC will matter more, not less — many more voters will see a push notification from the BBC News app, which has 12.6mn users, than will watch the first debate between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer.
One political consequence of this is a loss of control. The most harmful interview Starmer has given was on LBC, a commercial radio station. The damage was done when footage of the interview travelled widely on Meta’s various platforms and on TikTok.
The days in which a political leader could watch the six o’clock and 10 o’clock news, and look at the day’s papers, and get a reliable sense of how their campaign or that of their opponent was going have disappeared forever.
People in the two main parties will talk feverishly about the possibility of some future gaffe or row hurting their opponent. But equally, it might be that an interview given by Starmer or Sunak years ago resurfaces and enjoys a moment of unexpected virality online in a way that shifts opinions.
This new media landscape also means that politicians are always “on”. Starmer has a reputation for indecision and contortions over policy that it is hard to say is not well-deserved. But are his contortions really any more extravagant than New Labour’s were in the wake of its victory at the 1997 general election over the question of whether Britain, which was then still a member of the EU, should have joined the euro?
Probably not, but they are more prominently displayed and the focus on them is continuous.
The more important consequence of all this is an inevitable reduction in a shared sense of nationhood and belonging. When Tony Blair won his third and final election victory in 2005, the ITV soap opera Coronation Street got more than 11mn viewers and the majority of people only had access to five television channels.
Whoever wins the next election will do so in a country where Coronation Street, like Doctor Who, pulls in around 4mn viewers and increasingly small numbers of people think in terms of channels — let alone live in a household with access to just five.
The only way to get 14mn viewers these days is for the country to be overcome by a pandemic, for it to win a football tournament or for a monarch to die. There is not much to what passes for our shared national story beyond the royal family, sport, the condition of the roads or the railways, the NHS and the BBC.
So it’s not just that the winner of July’s election will have to navigate a faster-paced and more complex media environment — it is that they will be governing a country whose tastes and shared points of reference are more fragmented than ever.
