The woke warrior heading for Downing Street

The news that Andy Burnham has appointed James Purnell as his chief of staff has been greeted with horror by the likes of Owen Jones and Zack Polanski.

This is usually a good sign. Purnell’s past as a Blairite minister, pro-market stance and failure to despise Israel cast doubt, for them, on Burnham’s claim to be radical. Others might see this as a cause for relief. And what’s not to like about a man who once proposed, as Purnell did, lie detector-tests to weed out benefits cheats?

But just because the whiniest elements of the hard left loathe Purnell doesn’t mean his appointment is a good thing. For as smiley and reasonable as he appears, he embodies a problem with the modern left that’s every bit as pernicious as its economic incompetence. This is its obsession with imposing its fringe woke values on the rest of us.

If you want to know what makes Burnham’s new Svengali tick, forget the nearly two years he served as CEO of a global consultancy firm. Instead, look at what he did during his stint as one of the BBC’s top executives between 2013 and 2020, as both director of strategy and director of radio and education, when he championed the worst excesses of the diversity and inclusion agenda.

The climax of this stint was the publication in 2018 of an extraordinary report, ‘LGBT Culture and Progression’. It set out a detailed plan to transform the corporation and to force it to comply with the diktats of the LGBTQ+ lobby. Purnell oversaw the report and wrote the foreword. He applauded its recommendations, which he openly acknowledged were written with ‘support from Stonewall’. What could possibly go wrong?

The goal of this madcap project, believe it or not, was to stamp out ‘heteronormativity’ at the BBC. Apparently, it was a problem that the national broadcaster assumed heterosexuality is the default setting of human sexual orientation – even though it is. Where did Purnell imagine the BBC’s viewers came from?

In his foreword, Purnell argued ‘an organisation that appears to have a heteronormative culture’ would fail to attract 18- to 24-year-olds. What he failed to realise was that coming over all kinky and queer wouldn’t attract young people to the BBC either.

The joke is that the average age of a BBC One viewer at the time of Purnell’s report was 61. For BBC Two it was 62. Did he bother to ask viewers in their sixties if they fancied less heteronormativity with their BBC soaps? Did he heck.

In fact, the team behind the report didn’t canvass the opinion of anyone outside the BBC’s own buildings. Its recommendations were based exclusively on staff surveys run by the corporation’s in-house Pride group – which, as the report helpfully explained, represents anyone who is ‘genderqueer, bisexual, gay, lesbian, transgender, nonbinary, pansexual, intersex, asexual, queer, questioning or an ally’. The dinner party from hell, in other words.

With the blessing of Purnell, the demands of this tiny, unrepresentative bunch ricocheted through the BBC’s editorial output. One of the demands, for example, was for LGBT characters to feature more frequently and prominently in shows. If you want to complain about the endless succession of drag queens on your TV screen, Andy Burnham’s new chief of staff is your man.

Another demand was that staff should use preferred pronouns. This was taken by journalists as an instruction to respect the delusions of any crossdresser – even in news reports. Male rapists who claimed to be female would now routinely be referred to as ‘she / her’ by the BBC.

If you thought the age of the left imposing its fringe cultural obsessions on society might be coming to an end, then think again. Burnham’s most important hire is one of the worst kinds of cultural warriors. Let’s just hope James Purnell doesn’t get to do to Britain what he did to the BBC.

Malcolm Clark was LGB Alliance’s head of research from 2019 to 2022. Visit his Substack, The Secret Gender Files, here.