Accusing the BBC of bias is practically a British pastime at the moment. But long before today’s culture warriors started foaming at the mouth about “wokeness”, one man was already insisting the Beeb was a covert outpost of Marxism. His name was Captain Archibald Maule Ramsay, and he took things so far to the right that he eventually ended up behind a barbed-wire fence courtesy of His Majesty’s Government.

Ramsay was a Scottish Unionist MP with a posh accent, a chest full of medals, and political views that were already drifting towards ‘mad as a box of frogs’ territory. By the mid-1930s he was convinced Britain was being undermined by Bolsheviks, Jews, and anyone with a social conscience. Naturally, he decided the BBC was part of the conspiracy because, why not?

To Ramsay, the BBC was “too left-wing”, “too socialist”, and not nearly deferential enough to the sort of Britain he thought should still be run by aristocrats in tweed waving riding crops. The fact that the Corporation wouldn’t platform his paranoias probably didn’t help his state of mind. Ramsay, it seems, was a man of many moods, all of them bad.

The Right Club: Where Anti-Communism Went to Die

Ramsay soon founded something called The Right Club. It sounded like a Conservative wine society but was, in fact, a gathering of people who thought Hitler had some decent ideas if you ignored the triviality genocide. This wasn’t subtle, garden-variety grumbling about ruddy foreigners. This was full-blown far-right conspiratorial frothing that would make Jacob Rees-Mogg blush.

MI5, who happened to be quite busy at the time, noticed that some of Ramsay’s friends were cosying up to Nazi agents. This sort of thing tended to get the paperwork moving in the 1930s.

War Breaks Out. Ramsay Gets a Room with a View of Barbed Wire.

When Britain went to war in 1939, Ramsay didn’t rally behind the flag. He continued spouting pro-German sentiments like a man who had mistaken treason for a hobby. Churchill’s government, not known for its patience with Nazi-sympathising MPs, took a dim view.

Then it ramped up a notch: The MI5 believed that Ramsay and his Right Club pals were willing to assist a fascist coup if Germany ever invaded. Not ideal when you’re already up against it. Regulation 18B, the “we don’t have time for this nonsense” rule, was applied, and Ramsay spent four years interned. Along with Moseley (of Blackshirt fame) he was one of the very few MPs in British history to be imprisoned during wartime, and certainly the only one who complained about BBC bias on his way in.

Aftermath: A Footnote from Britain’s Political Cellar

Ramsay was released in 1944, by which point the world had moved on and he had become a historical cautionary tale in human form. Unsurprisingly, he never returned to political relevance due to the majority (but not all) of citizens not really liking fascists. He did find time to write a bitter memoir blaming everyone except the actual Nazis he used to nod along to, and eventually faded into obscurity.

And the BBC? It carried on broadcasting the news, utterly unfazed by the fact that one of its early critics turned out to be so far right the government treated him like a security threat and put him in prison. If anyone today claims the BBC annoys people on both sides, remind them: yes, and one of those sides once tried to stage a coup with the help of the Nazis.

Funny old world.