What's Ben doing on the box?

Ever since Labour lost the election and started collecting the dole, its former Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw has hardly been off the BBC, day or night. Switch on PM, and there he is. Slump in the sofa at Question Time, and Ben’s back. What’s going on?

Bradshaw, an ex-BBC news reporter of no visible merit, was the most anti-BBC of the last five DCMS Secretaries, attacking the institution in venomous language, both verbal and bodily. Unpopular when he drew a BBC wage, he was roundly loathed when he wielded power.

Yet no sooner is he out of a job than the BBC are plugging his down time with chat stints. It may be that he’s the only ex-Cabinet minister not to have cancelled his pager, or that he is a little more fluent than the rest of the defeated rabble. But what is the BBC doing giving him air time? Bradshaw was a bad minister with a sack of predictable whinges about broadcasting. His party has been turfed out of office. We should hear no more of him for the next few years.

Especially now that one his pet projects, the £166 million BFI Film Centre has just been scrapped by the new Government. Spend £166 million of public money on a glorified cinema? You see what I mean by a bad minister…