THE DIRTY SECRET OF THE BBC SISTERHOOD.

All forms of positive discrimination are pernicious, and Ollie rightly decried McGovern’s chippy belief that a presenter from humble origins, speaking in a regional accent, has intrinsic merit. Nevertheless, with many BBC women continuing to claim gender discrimination over pay, she also offered the heretical opinion: ‘It’s not as simple as a gender issue; it’s partly down to class. There are a lot of women who do a similar job to me who are paid a hell of a lot more . . . who are a lot posher than me.’ Claiming there to be a charmed circle of women is most certainly not from the script approved by the BBC sisterhood.

McGovern revealed that, following the latest stushie over pay differentials, only now has her salary been increased to six figures. Not being an aficionado of her work, I make no judgment on whether or not the increased pay reflects her ability. Until now, the only occasion upon which McGovern had crossed my radar was a report in January of viewers congratulating her on being pregnant, to which she had replied: ‘I am not “with child”, I am “with pot belly”’ – a response which, if nothing else, points to a degree of self-deprecation seldom evident amongst the solemn pay-gap protesters at the BBC.

She also opined that the pay of a BBC presenter should not exceed £150,000, which must have greatly annoyed many of the BBC women who last year signed the letter of complaint to director general Tony Hall. Those signatories included Fiona Bruce, Victoria Derbyshire, Mishal Husain, Martha Kearney and Laura Kuenssberg, all of whom already receive north of £200,000 and, by coincidence, all had the privilege of a private education. Also, despite six well-known BBC men having agreed in January to sizeable pay cuts, oddly there has been no report of a concomitant sacrifice by any of the Beeb’s exceptionally high-earning women, such as Claudia Winkleman, Alex Jones, Vanessa Feltz and the aforementioned Fiona Bruce.

It is instructive that following McGovern’s well-publicised assertion that many ‘posh’ female presenters still far earn more than she does, other BBC women, normally so vocal on matters of pay discrimination at the Corporation, have been strangely mute.

It’s almost as if all this gender-gap stuff is just a self-serving ploy.