No more Mr Nice Guy

Gavin 'BBC impartiality' Esler

As regular readers will know, I've spent years on various blogs chronicling in often tedious detail  and, if I may so, proving beyond doubt the chronic left-liberal, pro-EU bias of one particular BBC News Channel programme that barely anyone in the UK actually watches - namely Dateline London. 

For most of those years the programme was hosted by Gavin Esler, whose 'nice' TV persona never entirely disguised the fact that he was a left-liberal, pro-EU presenter heading a left-liberal, pro-EU-biased programme and skewing it towards his own point of view. 

Let's recall again some of Gavin's highlights as a licensed 'impartial' BBC presenter.

And, yes, he also used to brazenly scoff at critics of his 'impartiality' on Twitter during the latter stages of his Dateline days. 

On Donald Trump:

Donald Trump really is a fat-shaming, ill-informed, tax-avoiding misogynist who routinely insults people of other races. Why is this election even close? And why could Mr Trump still win?

On Boris Johnson:

...a man with a reputation for being born with a silver foot in his mouth...

On the EU referendum:

But what you might see is, broadly, the centre-left and the centre-right coalescing on a 'yes' vote and others towards the left and towards the far-right will say 'no'...

On the perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo atrocity:

...fringe figures in French society...two orphans (in) dead end jobs...

On the perpetrators of an Islamist atrocity in Brussels:

You could almost have written the script beforehand in a way: that they were people on the fringes of society with very little stake in that society, which they obviously hate.

On the 2015 migrant crisis:

There's been a lot of talk here and elsewhere about 'pull factors' - why people come - but actually the 'push factors' are the ones that seem to be in the case of the horrible case in Austria and those coming from Syria. That's what's moving people. They're being pushed.

On antisemitism and Islamophobia:

That's a very interesting point, Nesrine, because, in fact, there are a lot of parallels between anti-Semitism historically and Islamophobia now. There's absolutely no question of that. And that's the, quote, "perceived threat" of a particular minority.

On Hillary Clinton:

Hillary, who's one of the brightest women around... 

On immigration:

I've conducted some public meetings and ordinary members of the public have said precisely that, our health service could not exist without people who are migrants.

On Tony Blair and the Chilcot Inquiry:

This inquiry, they ask a question, they get an answer, they move onto something else, and that seems a bit feeble. There are all kinds of problems I've suggested here. There are people who watch this, who just want...who already loathe Tony Blair, and who just want to see that he's got fangs, horns and a tail, and all he said was 'this was a decision, it wasn't a conspiracy, I said pretty much public what I said privately'.

On the EU and Eurosceptics:

One way of looking at it is that Sarkozy and Merkel, and maybe Brown and Berlusconi and the others, want it to be - what did the French used to call it? - a 'union des patries', a union of sovereign states, which is what it is. So it's shot the idea that there's some federal superstate in the offing. I rarely hear the federalist superstate argument except for people who say they're opposed to it. You never hear anyone saying they want it.

All of those quotes came from him whilst he was serving as an 'impartial' BBC Dateline London's presenter.

And here he is today, post-BBC, openly being left-liberal and pro-EU and speaking for 'the entire country':

You could say that he's now 'showing his true colours' but, in truth, he showed them over his many years of hosting Dateline London.

And, despite all my endless chronicling, he got away with it. 

And the BBC got away with it too.