Wonk jock

Iain Dale

LBC
Monday to Friday 1600-2000

Iain Dale with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby

Seven o’clock on weekday evenings can be a difficult time for news listeners on British radio. On the national networks, as BBC 5 Live’s Drive programme hands over to Sport on Five, Radio 4’s post-Six O’Clock News you’ve-made-’em-glum-now-make-’em-laugh comedy slot gives way to a two-minute news summary then, for this listener at least, the make-’em-despair Archers cornerstone. Independent national radio offers nothing by way of an alternative: Talksport’s afternoon football show gives way to… well, more football. Only the BBC World Service offers its half-hour Newsroom round-up, but unless you have a DAB radio – common enough in the home these days, but still rare in the car – you can forget tuning in to that, and in any case its agenda is international, not domestic.

Three years ago a viable alternative appeared on LBC in the shape of Iain Dale, the Conservative blogger and publisher. Initially in an evening slot, Dale’s show gave radio news listeners somewhere to go at 7pm, though if you stayed on until 10 you found you were listening to news about Martha’s intractable haemorrhoid problems in Willesden rather than the latest political manoeuvrings in Westminster. Last March, Dale got to ditch the medical phone-in segment and really stretch his wings in an extended 4-8pm slot. Suddenly you had not just an evening bolt-hole, but a whole new drivetime place to go, focused on news and politics. It was like asking for a jam sandwich before bedtime and being taken out to dinner instead.

Of course, beyond the reach of LBC’s London transmitters – the show goes out on 97.3 MHz FM, the 1152 AM rolling news service joins FM at 7pm and both services are on the Greater London DAB multiplexes – if you’re listening at all you’ll be listening online, so if you’re driving you’re probably still experiencing your own 7 o’clock news dilemma. Interestingly, LBC is audible via DAB in Glasgow and Edinburgh, which must say something about its extra-metropolitan appeal. At this point I begin to wish, all over again, that Channel 4 Radio had stuck with its plans for a high-quality speech station to rival BBC Radio 4. Iain Dale’s show is a prime example of how good that independent national output could have been – and I believe the BBC’s networks would benefit from that competition.

As soon as you get into the meat of the show at 4pm after short news and travel bulletins, you realise you’re sitting at a very different table from the BBC’s news and current affairs offerings. There are fewer dishes, but they’re bigger, and take longer to eat: the first item can last until 4.45. What the show loses in breadth – by this time, 5 Live’s Drive show will have covered 8 or 9 items – it gains in depth, or at least Iain Dale must hope hope so. He’s in the hands of his guests, and his callers.

Dale certainly attracts a high class of guest: a roll-call of powerful and influential people turn up, and often seem happy to stay on and slug out an issue at length – including with callers. And they’re not all his Tory mates: John Cruddas, Peter Hain, Alastair Campbell, Jeremy Corbyn have all made recent appearances, as have Liberals and UKIP and others. UKIP’s leader Nigel Farage proved once again that he has a great voice for radio. In fact, if you’d never heard the show before, you could be forgiven for assuming Farage was the presenter: he has a deep, mannered voice with a resonance the microphone likes. It’s a commercial voice – if UKIP bomb at the next general election, Farage could make a good living voicing radio ads – and, like a radio pro, he’s completely in charge of it, making it swoop and rise with indignation as he describes how everyone told him UKIP would never succeed in winning the next Euro elections, but look how wrong he’s proved them all. Farage’s voice, nicely balanced by his bloke-down-the-pub affability, draws you in, and you have to snap out of it and remind yourself that he hasn’t actually won them yet.

Mid-interview, a Channel 4 film crew turned up, just in time to hear Dale confront Farage with a bit of facer: a letter from his schooldays, unearthed by Channel 4, in which a teacher apparently branded him a ’fascist’ and ‘racist’. Farage brushed off the allegations, but, listening, I thought the whole episode sounded more than a little contrived. By whom, I wouldn’t know, but it didn’t do the programme any favours. Guests, though, are only half the story. What about the callers?

Beneath all phone-ins lies a lowest common denominator of radio content, a sort of aural sump. It’s ingredients are simple: an uninformed caller trades prejudices with an equally uninformed presenter. You know the sort of thing:
“Well, Mike, I blame the Huguenots. We should never have let ‘em in.”
“OK, Dean, fair point. I’ll put that to Ken Livingstone later, and we’ll see if he defends the policy.”
I’d be less than honest if I said the dialogue with callers on Dale’s show never dips that low. All phone-ins run the risk – even Radio 4’s Any Answers gets the occasional ranter – and the worst consist of little else. However, I think I can say that either his production team are good at filtering out the worst offenders, or Iain Dale simply attracts a better class of caller. On the subject of Syria’s chemical weapons, one Iranian listener put his point sceptically and elegantly: ‘Have the countries of the West got rid of all their chemical weapons? And, if they have, who was invited to the bonfire of their vanities?’ This is where a prime-time BBC programme could have wheeled on a defence correspondent with an answer – but this kind of question doesn’t get asked on prime-time BBC programmes.

So what’s Dale’s secret? If you check out his blog, you quickly become aware that he is no wishy-washy, liberal Conservative. We are dealing here with a true blue Tory. Here’s a fairly typical rant:

The stupidity of the fracking protesters in Balcombe knows no bounds. The usual professional green activists, who we no doubt fund through the benefits system, have gathered at a site where no fracking is taking place, nor is it likely to. These are the same people who no doubt pitched their tents at Greenham Common, supported Swampy and have hitched their skirts to the great global warming swindle. If they think fracking is so terrible, why haven’t they protested at the hundreds of other sites in the country where it has been going on for years? I’ll tell you why. Because they don’t give a damn about fracking. All they care about is rebelling against society and attaching them (sic) to the latest leftist-green cause. They’re the true watermelons – green on the outside, red on the inside. And Caroline Lucas is the perfect exemplification of this. I’m all in favour of people’s right to protest, but at least have the decency to have the vaguest idea what you’re protesting about.

Despite this vehemence, Dale’s views don’t intrude much on the show. Every so often he’ll introduce an item and state his view; cueing in an item on the MMR vaccination, for example, he cheerfully reminds us he’s previously described the attitude of parents who balk at giving their children the jab as ‘tantamount to child abuse’. But there’s not much of this and it never gets divisively party political; no doubt he’s aware that his predecessor, James Whale, was sacked for urging listeners to vote for Boris Johnson as London Mayor.

And, understandably, he’s said relatively little on air about a recent incident at the Labour Party conference in Brighton when he was cautioned after a struggle with an anti-nuclear protestor who was trying to get into shot in a BBC interview with Dale. What was Dale, a former Tory candidate, doing at Labour’s annual bash? Making trouble, of course, and money. Dale is big in the book trade, having set up the politics and current affairs publisher Biteback in 2009. He wheeled his latest author, Gordon Brown’s former advisor Damian ‘McPoison’ McBride down to Brighton to launch his book of political revelations amongst the party faithful, so as to garner lots of nice reaction and publicity – smart commercial move – divert media attention from Labour policies and, by the by, see how much McMuck might spatter on the likes of Eds Miliband and Balls. You can see why he wasn’t happy: you come down to Brighton to steal someone else’s limelight, some anti-nuclear hippy tries to do the same to you, and you end up horizontal on the prom with muck on your face. The ruddy cheek of it.

Fortunately for his listeners – and unlike some of his LBC colleagues – Dale is incapable of keeping his mind closed for long. His show is, if you like, right-wing radio, but it’s a million miles from the shock-jock radio you get in the US; Iain Dale is no Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern – for which I, at any rate, breathe a sigh of thanks. I recommend all lefties listen in; whatever our political persuasions, we all spend too much time having our prejudices confirmed by reading this or that newspaper or following this or that like-minded celebrity’s Twitter feed; hearing how the other half think is always salutary. For all his online opinions and occasional antics, he’s a well-educated Conservative with a sharp political mind and a long political memory. In American political circles he’d be called a ‘policy wonk’ and would be a guest on talk radio. In Britain, he’s at his best presenting talk radio. Faced with an extreme caller, Iain Dale doesn’t hang up; he doesn’t revile his political ideology; he doesn’t bludgeon him with the same viewpoint over and over again; he simply adopts a disappointed tone and says “Mike, if you’re going to talk like that, people will just not take you seriously.”

UPDATE: on 11 February 2014, LBC became a national station on DAB; in the station’s jingles, the tagline ‘London’s Biggest Conversation’ has become ‘Leading Britain’s Conversation’. The Telegraph’s Gillian Reynolds praised the move, suggesting LBC’s owners, Global, had done it to gain influence at Westminster and that the nation would learn to love Nick Ferrari at breakfast. I dare say it might; but the producers of national drivetime news output should also cock a serious ear at Iain Dale’s show. His political sympathies are clear, but never kneejerk, and he is quick to criticise politicians of any colour if he thinks they’ve misbehaved – as in this clip from his show 6 days before the Culture Secretary, Maria Miller, resigned.