Tories Get Creative

Universal Music International head Lucian Grainge has joined a task force set up to advise the Tories on how they should work with the creative industries.

Grainge, along with former BBC director-general Greg Dyke and Elisabeth Murdoch, the chief executive of TV production company Shine, will be part of shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt’s think-tank on cultural policy.

What will he say to a Tory party with high hopes of returning to power? At the Digital Britain Summit at The National Library, London, April 17, he told delegates he’s happy with the government’s plan to get tougher with unauthorised downloaders.

Dyke will lead the team, which is another odd political turnaround for the former Beeb chief. He got into television in 1977, joining London Weekend Television as a researcher, because he was unemployed after failing to get elected as a Labour member for the Greater London Council.

Seventeen years later, when he’d become LWT’s chief exec and £7 million ($10.2 million) richer when it was bought out by Granada, he was still a Labour supporter and gave thousands of pounds in donations to party funds.

Dyke took over at the BBC in 2000, but four years later fell out with Labour when was ousted after a row about Andrew Gilligan’s report on the “sexed-up” dossier that Tony Blair used to help to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Dyke had adopted Gilligan’s cause as his own, and was forced out after the government’s “Hutton Inquiry” found the BBC’s editorial and management processes were “defective.”

Dyke appeared to have turned toward the Liberal Democrats, having given them £10,000 to help fight the last election.

Dyke is also chairman of the British Film Institute and of HIT Entertainment, the company behind “Bob The Builder.”