Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is a Latin phrase found in the work of the Roman poet Juvenal from his Satires (Satire VI, lines 347–348). It is literally translated as "Who will guard the guards themselves?", though it is also known by variant translations, such as "Who watches the watchers?" and "Who will watch the watchmen?".

It seems that the Tories may be panning that it will be their placemen.

Claims that the UK  the government has  asked right-wing commentator Charles Moore and former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre to fill two powerful UK media jobs.ClainBritain’s culture secretary Oliver Dowden have been  denied well in art anyway 

The Sunday Times reported that Moore has been tapped to be the next chair of the BBC, while Dacre is set to be installed as the new chair of UK media regulator Ofcom.

The government is responsible for recruiting for both roles and the Sunday Times said prime minister Boris Johnson wants the pair, both ferocious critics of the BBC, to usher in a “revolution” in UK broadcasting.

Senior government insiders told the newspaper that hiring Moore as a replacement for outgoing BBC chair David Clementi is a “done deal,” while Johnson “wooed” Dacre for the Ofcom job over drinks at Downing Street in February.

But speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show on Sunday,  Culture  Olive Dowden denied that any decisions have been made prior to the government launching a formal recruitment process.

Asked if Moore and Dacre had been offered the jobs, Dowden said: 

“No. We have a formal process for them to go through.” Asked if there had been “behind the scenes” talks about the roles, Dowden said: “I have conversations with people all the time… It is not my role to offer them the job.”

Moore, a former Daily Telegraph editor, has waged war on the BBC and its funding the model, the license fee, for more than a decade. So much so, he was fined by a court in 2010 for not paying the fee.

In a Daily Telegraph column in February, he applauded the BBC’s “global reputation” before reeling off a laundry list of things he does not like about the corporation.

“Here are some weaknesses: entertainment channels, including Radio 1 and Radio 2, which could be better done commercially; a website which crushes competition; a massive, talent-destroying bureaucracy; and, yes, bias,” he wrote.

“This bias is not chiefly party political (though it is certainly anti-Tory). It is politico/cultural – woke, pro-Remain, credulously green, anti-market, obsessed with issues connected with “diversity”, yet itself not truly diverse at all.”

  It is politico/cultural – woke, pro-Remain, credulously green, anti-market, obsessed with issues connected with “diversity”, yet itself not truly diverse at all.”

Paul Michael Dacre is an English journalist and the former long-serving editor of the British right-wing tabloid the Daily Mail. He is editor-in-chief of DMG Media, which publishes the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday, the free daily tabloid Metro, the Mailonline website, and other titles.^[

Andrew O'Hagan wrote in the London Review of Books in 2017 that Dacre's 

"worst effect" on the Mail "has been to let it seem mired in the things it hates, as if society’s worst excesses were mostly an outgrowth of its own paranoid imagination". In his view, under its editor the paper is a "bubbling quagmire of prejudice posing as news, of opinion dressed as fact, and contempt posing as contempt for that portion of the world’s population that doesn’t live in Cheam". Polly Toynbee in 2004 commented "Read him out the first clause of the press code - the one that tells newspapers not to 'publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted material', and he replies with a straight face that the Mail obeys it"

Recently the internet was Up In Arms after The Telegraph reported that the new Director General of the BBC, Tim Davie, (No i did not miss out the S) was set to drastically reduce the amount of left-wing comedy on the BBC

I suspect the Moore , Dacre  claims was part of a goverment Kite flying exercise and was meant to draw the predictable fire so that when the appointments are made they will be less controversial , though equally right wing and hostile to the BBC.

indeed I it may only because Rupert Murdoch  is an American citizen is the only reason that he has (despite his alleged republicism) is why the Tories have not elevated him to the House of Lords and Minister pf Propaganda.

How much more control does the Right need  it seems that some aspects of the centre and left are allowed to exist so that the government know who we are.

In one of John le Carré novels he claims that many of the Far Left parties whose newspapers turn up at demos   are secretly finance by the security services to do just that.

We must not become paranoid however, but it is clear we are  constantly  vigilant.