Max Hastings defends ‘posh’ Ed Stourton

The brutal sacking of Ed ‘Posh’ Stourton from BBC Radio 4's Today programme has stirred up two of the biggest beasts of the journalist world. Writing in the Daily Mail, Sir Max Hastings, a former editor of the Daily Telegraph and the Evening Standard, says that Stourton, who attended Cambridge and the Catholic public school Ampleforth, was almost certainly the victim of class prejudice at the Beeb.

While Hastings concedes Stourton is probably not of the same calibre as Newsnight's Jeremy Paxman and his Today colleague John Humphrys, he observes: "They [the BBC] think that in order to reach out to the mass audience of British people, it is essential to talk to them in accents and language which they can relate to - even if this requires the employment of idiots to do it.

"It is the fact that Stourton talks funny that distresses them. It is all a great pity, because it is yet another manifestation of the loss of moral and editorial direction at the BBC. Stourton's accent may be upmarket, but what he says is always coherently expressed and articulated. It should not matter in the slightest degree that he possesses a 'posh' accent."

John Tusa, the former managing director of the BBC World Service, concurs. Praising Stourton's "slightly plummy, mellifluous voice", he writes in the Guardian: "There is, it should be noted, an unpleasant strain of populist inverted snobbery wafting around the whole affair – namely that Stourton is a bit, well, too ‘middle class’." ·