[gottago]

I'd like to ask what made Nadine Dorries "Britain's worst Culture Secretary" but then this would become a political discussion, which isn't allowed on this forum.

Luckily she caused enough of a direct negative impact on the TV industry to allow this to be discussed:



[*]She pursued a full enquiry into the privatisation of Channel 4, costing the taxpayer at least £2 million and forcing great expense on C4 to defend its own position, diverting money away from programme making while the channel and industry was still recovering from Covid. She continued to personally pursue privatisation despite 96% of respondents to the initial consultation disagreeing with the privatisation plans and overwhelming initial evidence that it would have a sizeable negative impact on the wider industry. All this (allegedly) because C4 News replaced the no-show prime minister at a climate debate with a melting ice sculpture. 
[*]At a Select Committee she accused C4 and Love Productions of hiring actors to appear with her in the documentary series Tower Block of Commons forcing them to conduct a thorough review using external lawyers, sifting through hours of rushes and recontacting the contributors she interacted with from 12 years ago; again at C4's expense. Unsurprisingly it found there was absolutely no evidence for her claims. The House of Commons culture select committee also found her claims weren't credible and she may now be blocked from becoming a member of the House of Lords.
[*]She announced on a whim that the License Fee would be scrapped after 2027 despite the government itself saying no plan had been decided on for the future funding model (which remains the case).
[*]She suggested she was going to pursue legislation that would limit free speech by 'holding to account' streaming services for airing offensive jokes in the wake of Jimmy Carr's stand up special; though to be honest I don't think even she really knew what she meant by that.


That's just TV, of course there's plenty of other examples of her mismanagement and mistakes, from believing she had authority over council-run tennis "pitches" to personally awarding Grade II listed status to a plaque dedicated to an architect of Apartheid, but that's for discussion elsewhere.

Considering she was only in the role for a year it's quite an astonishingly bad track record. I think her only achievement, if you can even call it that, was forcing national museums to stick a sign near the front door saying it was funded by the UK government, and I'm not even sure that's actually happening. She's certainly, by quite some margin, the worst culture secretary I can think of. 

I wonder if she'll manage to be at Talk TV longer than she managed as culture secretary.