The BBC, Ofcom and now the British Museum - why do the Tories keep interfering in cultural appointments? | Charlotte Higgins

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

52% : More than one person has told me that under Boris Johnson the social media accounts of candidates for positions on boards were raked through, with anti-Brexit positions seen as a red flag.
51% : No 10's demand was the latest in a long line of attempted assaults on the independence of public institutions.
46% : And yet the current government has, time and again, pushed against this principle, especially through the way in which public appointments are made by supposedly independent panels.
45% : It would be wrong to say that Labour, or earlier generations of Tories, had never tried to influence public appointments.
42% : In Johnson's No 10, the Tory fixer Dougie Smith and longtime Johnson adviser Munira Mirza were in charge of trying to ensure figures friendly to the government ended up in public positions - such was the deep paranoia about the supposed "cultural Marxism" raging through museums and other organisations.

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