Having each other's backs

Talking of spiked, Mick Hume has a piece in the Daily Mail today headlined Whatever you think of Boris, the BBC’s obsessive campaign to destroy him is a disgrace. Along the way he criticizes Nick Robinson for leading the "Boris-bashing" on Today, and "sneering" and "going beyond what could be considered objective journalism".

Far from being impartial, Robinson was editorialising at every opportunity, the tone always scathing or sarcastic — to the point where one could almost hear him rubbing his hands with glee during each dramatic pause in his diatribe.

Mick Hume puts it down to BBC bias:

It has built itself in the image of the woke metropolitan elites who run it. And they long since decided that, to appropriate Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase, Boris is not ‘one of us’.

Interestingly, the comments at the Mail are going the BBC's way for once. "Boris-bashing" has spread in recent weeks among the public, unimpressed at everything they've been hearing about Partiesgate.

Still, I've rather enjoyed the irony today of the very personification, indeed the living embodiment, of those "woke metropolitan elites", ex-Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, riding to Nick Robinson's aid on Twitter:

Alan Rusbridger: Portraying Nick Robinson as a member of the woke metropolitan elite - the latest Mail obsession - is wide of the mark. I doubt it will stop him doing his job rather well. It’s called journalism.

Nick Robinson: Thanks Alan. I rather enjoyed the irony of being accused of anti-Tory bias by a former editor of Living Marxism 🤣.

And Gary Lineker has popped in too with a smug "quick reminder":

Gary Lineker: Quick reminder: the BBC has tens of thousands of people that work for It, with a huge cross section of views. The corporation doesn’t think as one. There’s no political criteria from above other than impartiality in news & current affairs. Any perceived bias is probably your own.

It may be a typo on Gary' part, but I shall think of the BBC as "It" from now it. Never mind 'Auntie Beeb', it's 'Cousin It' from now on.