I was assaulted by government minister, says Joan Bakewell

Joan Bakewell has said she was sexually harassed early in her career by a junior government minister, as she described sexism she experienced while working for the BBC.

The broadcaster told Times Radio about a career spanning more than 50 years, and revealed how she was the “victim of unwelcome attention” during the 1950s and 1960s.

In the interview, the 87-year-old described how a junior minister, who has since died, had to be “fended off” after he made a grab for her.

“I was assaulted by a member of the government in a taxi when I went to fetch him from the House of Commons to come on the programme,” she said. “You know, this kind of thing happened, it happened all the time.”

When asked whether she reported the minister to police, she said there would have been no point.

She explained: “They would’ve said, well, that’s just to do with your private life. You’re alright, he’s not done anything that breaks the law.”

She said there was no point in discussing harassment with senior figures at the BBC “because they would be doing the same thing”.

Lady Bakewell, who fronted factual programmes including Late Night Line-Up and Heart of the Matter, described how a group of women at the BBC attempted to lodge a complaint against a male member of staff who later got promoted “pretty near the top”.

“There was someone who was persistently harassing a whole department of women as it were, one by one,” she said. “He would invite them home and behave badly and they began to tell each other.

“They began to share the secret with each other and found it hateful and so they decided that they would all get together and as a group make a protest about this person.

“And they went to the head of department and it eventually went up to, I think as far as the controller, and the person was reprimanded and then he was promoted.”

Although there were “numbers of predators” within the BBC, Bakewell said no one knew about Jimmy Savile at the time, but added: “We all thought he was extremely weird.”

Bakewell has spoken previously of her support for the #MeToo movement, which campaigns against sexual violence, hailing its values and female solidarity.

In the interview, she also described accepting a peerage from the former Labour leader Ed Miliband despite voting for the Green party at the previous election due to her anger over the Iraq war.

“I marched against the Iraq war with about a million other people,” she said. “So I wasn’t going to vote Labour, didn’t support the Labour party at that time and I had to explain that to Ed Miliband.

“I said, ‘I’d like you to go away and consider whether you want me to be a Labour peer and I have to consider whether I want to be,’ so we agreed to speak again at which point Ed said, ‘Yes, I would like you to,’ and I said, ‘I will accept.’”