at least the mid-1980s, the Corporation has often been criticised for a perceived bias against those on the centre-right of politics". Similar allegations have been made by past and present employees such as Antony Jay, North American editor Justin Webb, former editor of the Today programme Rod Liddle, former correspondent Robin Aitken and Peter Sissons, a former news presenter. The former political editor Andrew Marr argued in 2006 that the liberal bias of the BBC is the product of the types of people that it employs and so is cultural, not political. In 2011, Peter Oborne wrote in his Daily Telegraph blog, "Rather than representing the nation as a whole, it [the BBC] has become a vital resource – and sometimes attack weapon – for a narrow, arrogant Left-Liberal elite". In recent years, Peter Oborne has criticised the BBC for exhibiting a bias in favour of the Conservatives. Speaking to journalists at a Broadcasting Press Guild lunch in 2009, Jeremy Hunt, the then Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, claimed that BBC News needed more people from the centre-right: "I wish they would go and actively look for some Conservatives to be part of their news-gathering team, because they have acknowledged that one of their problems is that people who want to work at the Corporation tend to be from the centre-left. That's why they have this issue with what Andrew Marr called an innate liberal bias". Other commentators have taken the opposite view and criticised the BBC for being part of The Establishment. In 2009, Mehdi Hasan wrote in the New Statesman that the BBC was biased "towards power and privilege, tradition and orthodoxy". He said that the view that the BBC was biased to the left, which he said had been "internalised even by liberals and leftists", "is a calculated and cynical move by the right to cow the corporation into submission". Giving as examples Andrew Neil, Nick Robinson, Robbie Gibb and Guto Harri he wrote that the rightwing backgrounds of "various prominent BBC employees have been curiously unexamined in the row over "bias" ". In 2014, The Guardian columnist Owen Jones wrote that "research actually suggests the BBC's output is biased towards establishment and rightwing sources" and that the BBC is "stacked full of rightwingers", mentioning by name chairman of the BBC Trust Chris Patten (former chair of Conservative Party and government minister), political