Easy hits

The weekly 'special advisors' election segment on Paddy's Broadcasting House has, as you know, been controversial - well, with us anyhow. 

The first issue concerned representation, with question marks hanging over the presence of a weekly Liberal Democrat former advisor alongside the former Conservative and Labour advisors. Was that over-promoting the Lib Dems? Well, this week the Lib Dems were dropped and a former SNP advisor (Geoff Aberdein, who was - to Paddy's delight - in Aberdeen) brought in instead. Wonder which other parties will appear? (If Raheem Kassam, former advisor to Nigel Farage, appears I'll eat George Galloway's hat). 

The second issued concerned the 'supporter' status of the Conservative and Labour former advisors, in that the the Conservatives are represented by somewhat who doesn't support the Conservatives while Labour is represented by who supports Jeremy Corbyn. 

Jo Tanner and Simon Fletcher were back again this week, Simon being pleasantly on-message and positive for Jeremy and Jo being all 'detached and impartial' and downbeat about the Tories. 

Cue a post I prepared yesterday, before unexpectedly having to go out and party, but which l plonk here instead:

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Regular readers might be delighted to learn that today's weekend edition of the BBC's would-be-hip Electioncast podcast, presented by The Great Chris Mason, featured two guests - former Gordon Brown/Ed Miliband advisor, no Labour Party peer, Stewart Wood and former advisor to Boris Johnson, Jo Tanner. 

Yes, that Jo Tanner - the one Paddy's Broadcasting House is using as 'the Conservative-supporting special advisor', despite her not being a Conservative or a Conservative supporter. 

Here again, Jo emphasised the fact that she doesn't vote 'Tory' and doesn't support the 'Tories'. Stewart, as I may have mentioned, is a serving Labour Party peer. 

Go figure how that works, BBC impartiality-wise!

On Electioncast, she criticised Boris's reponse to the London terrorist attack on several fronts, calling him "opportunistic". She didn't think he was "quite right" to say what he said and didn't think bringing up police numbers was "necessary" either. Labour's Lord Wood agreed that Boris's response "left a bad taste in the mouth", though he was less strong in his criticism of Boris, saying we "shouldn't overegg" it.

Really, BBC?

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It's quite something really, isn't it? Wonder where Jo will turn up next on the BBC? Somewhere with Ash Sarkar perhaps?

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I must say though that former SNP chief-of-staff Geoff Aberdein was very engaging. I hope he reappears.

Paddy: Geoff Aberdein, do you think that the leader of the SNP would have given an interview to the BBC is she thought that the leader of the Conservatives was not going to? 

Geoff: Well, yes I do. And the reason I do is because, as somebody that advised the SNP for a number of years, it's a great advantage to being a Scottish politician going on a UK-wide TV audience (sic) because you get much more coverage. But, also, you can bank upon - and I'm sorry to be a little bit rude here - hoping that the interviewer doesn't know much about the intracacies of Holyrood politics as much as they do about Westminster politics. We very much viewed it as an easy hit.

I've seen so many UK-wide BBC interviews with the SNP over the years (Andrew Neil excepted) that that's not exactly news, but it lays out a real failing in our Westminster/Salford-dominated BBC.