'hasta la vista, baby’

This post has little to do with the BBC. I'm not speaking for Craig here, but I rarely watch it now so I’m afraid that might be the direction this blog is veering towards. But you never know.

I don’t think I’m the only one who’s suffering from buyer's remorse. I’m talking about Boris, obviously, but I didn’t particularly buy into Boris's defenestration in the first place, at any rate not enough to cause remorse. I am genuinely sorry to see him go, even if I do think he is starting to look gleeful about it himself.  I was beginning to wonder if the Ukraine business had an element of deflection about it. 

I never bought the argument that it was the ‘lying’ wot done it, and I wasn’t completely persuaded by the  'lack of political integrity’ argument because I think charisma all but overrides the rest of it. 

Maybe it’s all Carrie’s fault. (The wallpaper! And that ain’t the half of it.) 

 

Several commentators seem to be expressing regret too.  Because just look at who we’re left with. 

Rishi reduced his chances in one fell swoop in the ITV ‘debate’ (It wasn’t a debate) by posing a pair of questions that gifted Liz Truss a massive open goal, which she duly took advantage of, simultaneously hitting the back of the net and revealing a worrying lack of perspicaciousness in her suddenly sheepish-looking interlocutor.

Penny Mordaunt has excellent hair, but it just wasn’t enough to counteract that MCB blunder. 

Kemi Badenoch is the most promising, but maybe she’s positioned herself even better (fortuitously) for the future. 

Anyway, it’s too late now. If it’s Liz, a good hairdresser can do wonders. A bit of body; that’s the way to do it.

Seven days in July

For an alternative take to Brendan's...

The [UK] Press Gazette has a piece by its editor-in-chief, Dominic Ponsford, headlined Seven days in July when journalists brought 'careless power' to account. 

Dominic of the Press Gazette, not to be confused with Mr Cummings, is impressed by his likeminded fellow journalists. And not just by the press, but by BBC broadcasters too.

The BBC rode hard, reins cracking. during the latest charge to dethrone Boris, and the final cannon blast that sounded the casus belli to topple the present PM came via the BBC itself - specifically from BBC political correspondent Ione Wells. 

Ione, as Dominic Ponsford puts it, 'revealed' that Boris 'had been told about a formal complaint about Mr Pinchergate MP’s “inappropriate behaviour” when he was a Foreign Office minister in 2019/20'.

The BBC made Pinchergate top news for 6-7 days. 

Ione Wells of the BBC has been the toast of left-leaning/pro-EU/pro-BBC Twitter and their media friends ever since. 

Ione evidently dug well.

So, in the same spirit, let's dig too...

...and using 'Farage' as my knee-jerk first 'search' on Twitter when investigating BBC journalists' tweets - as it's such a 'tell' as to where they're coming from politically - ...

...here's Ione, before joining the BBC and 'leaving her coat at the door', displaying her hand:

And this time-marked link [if she doesn't delete it] will bring up all of her tweets around the time of the 2016 referendum on the UK remaining in or leaving the EU. Here are just a few of many, many examples, e.g.:

No wonder she's played such a part in Boris going. Ever so impartially of course.

Apologies if this is old news - though I've not seen it elsewhere yet. 

I'm guessing others will have been 'doing an Ione' and doing unto Ione what Ione has been doing unto Boris. 

But if we've 'a scoop' here, hopefully Pippa Crerar and Beff and Paul Brand and Robert Peston will put the blog up for an award.

And, to end, one for my 90-year-old Dad and a favourite piece of music of his, best known for being played via a BBC concert conducted by John Wilson. 

Here's the original though - not conducted by either JW or the BBC - displaying latter gangs of 'journalists', BBC ones near the front, high-fiving each other as they converge and rampage in pursuit of Boris's head. Is that the late departing Lewis Goodall I see cantering in from the left?

The composer is the wonderful Franz Waxman:

 

Did the BBC spike Boris?

spiked has paraphrased the nub of Brendan O'Neill's latest piece into a tweet: 

We need to talk about the role the media played in toppling Boris. The BBC and others blew Partygate and Pinchergate out of proportion and goaded Tory rebels to resign. They helped to orchestrate Boris’s fall. That’s not democratic, says Brendan O’Neill.

Here's the passage that relates to the main theme of this 'ere blog:

But just because the push against Boris had no leader and no decipherable purpose does not mean it wasn’t orchestrated. This is where we come to the most chilling feature of this strangest of political takedowns – the role played by the media. As the old public realm has been denuded of structure and ideas, so the media have come to play an outsized part in shaping political discussion and even determining politicians’ fortunes. The media unquestionably stoked the anti-Boris revolt. First by blowing those daft scandals out of proportion, unilaterally decreeing that they were the most important issues in the land. And secondly by goading, subtly and perhaps only semi-consciously, each of the actors in the lonely faction.

Indeed, the rebels’ letters of resignation were primarily aimed at the media. They were for the BBC and the Guardian and social media, not for us in the now broken and disregarded realm of what used to be called public life. This is why they all first appeared on Twitter – where else? – and why they were written in such media-speak. Because the audience was the media elites, not the people. A clear symbiotic relationship has now developed between an isolated political class searching for a new public realm in which to execute its business and a media that can sniff the power it accidentally enjoys in the post-party, post-ideological age. Call me old-fashioned, but I see little positive in the removal of a PM voted into power by 14million citizens by disparate aggrieved Tory actors and a media establishment that understands us even less than politicians do.

Even if Boris deserved the boot, doesn't Brendan have a point? 

Rope-a-dope

  

I've learned a new phrase today, courtesy of Nick Robinson:

“Rope a dope” is clearly Boris Johnson’s new tactic on partygate - he simply absorbed & ignored repeated questions from Sophie Raworth before linking his plight to the Ukraine crisis by insisting he’s lucky to live in a democracy where PMs can face such troubles.

rope-a-dope

NOUN US informal

a boxing tactic of pretending to be trapped against the ropes, goading an opponent to throw tiring ineffective punches

In other news, it's being widely reported that there's a 'very BBC' all-female shortlist developing for Andrew Marr's replacement and Sophie's on it. Nick Robinson himself has stood in for Andrew Marr several times. I'm guessing he might have fancied the job permanently. 

Nick has HIS say

Here's Nick Robinson saying something nice about former BBC colleague/Newnight political editor Allegra Stratton in her hour of need:

Now that really is an apology … https://t.co/CvnM4U5LYg

— Nick Robinson (@bbcnickrobinson) December 8, 2021#

Of course, he's also saying that as a transparent sneer about Boris Johnson's 'apology' in the Commons today. 

All in all, he's, as ever, being quite free with his opinions today on Twitter. Here's another:

“Never apologise. Never explain” has long been Boris Johnson ’s watchword. He has now apologised & he has explained … that it was all someone else fault. He’s threatened those who work for him with disciplinary action. Those who trash their staff often live to regret it. 

I think he's right, but I don't he should be saying it as an impartial BBC reporter. But, as we know, that ship has already sailed for good, like the Titanic.

Nick v Boris

Please check out the discussion on the Open Thread about the BBC's recent interviewing of Boris Johnson.

I've posted already about the hostile Andrew Marr interview on Sunday. 

One bit I missed was taken up by others, including some newspapers - namely the bit where 'Andrew Marr called Boris Johnson a liar' over the question of rising wages.

"You’ve said something that isn’t true, you’ve said something that isn’t true about wages," said Mr Marr.

But I see that Full Fact - a 'fact-checking' organisation many of the Right are sceptical of - found Andrew Marr rather than Boris Johnson to have been wrong.

Ouch! Wonder if the next edition of The Andrew Marr Show will address that?

---------------

As for Nick Robinson's famous Today interview yesterday where he told the PM to 'Stop talking!', well, statistics can perhaps add a little extra to the story. 

I've been applying the old stopwatch and counting.

From the moment Nick Robinson began speaking at the very start of the interview to the moment when he told Boris Johnson to 'stop talking', 6m31s had passed and Nick Robinson had been talking for 2m37s of it - introducing, repeatedly interrupting, asking several long questions, heckling.

So, if you crunch the maths, the BBC interviewer had talked for slightly over 40% of the time and his guest - the UK Prime Minister - just under 60% of the time. 

If a BBC interviewer talks for over 40% of the first six-and-a-half minutes of an interview then I don't think that BBC interviewer has been particularly hard done by. 

In fact, that sort of balance makes me think that the interviewer was trying to dominate the interview, because interviewees are usually allowed to speak a lot more than interviewers during interviews.

Indeed, Nick had already tried interrupting twice in the first minute of Boris's opening answer. His first attempt came just 33 seconds in, and - after a further go at interrupting soon after - he'd 'fully' interrupted barely a minute after Boris began.  

Thereafter, the pace of Nick's incessant talking quickened, and eight more significant interruptions followed before the 'Stop talking!' moment.

Now Boris can certainly waffle and bluster, and he can dodge questions for England, but he wasn't dodging the questions here.

I'm guessing that Nick went in tooled up for a fight with a ready response, especially following [a] the Andrew Marr interview and [b] it having been two years since Boris Johnson agreed to be interviewed by Today. 

Part of the evidence is that he introduced the PM [very 'unhelpfully' for Boris] by framing it as 'Crisis? Which crisis?' and that, even before letting him speak, Nick said it was 'the first time he's agreed to talk to us...[dramatic pause]...in two years'. 

And, after his first two attempts to stop the PM, his third [successful] attempt - 1m 6s into Boris's first reply - was prefaced with the words, 'Just have to pause for a second, then I can put a question to you'.

Yet Boris repeatedly gave in when when Nick made attempts to intervene, giving way a second time shortly after. Another Nick interruption soon followed as Boris began his third answer and Boris tried to counter this next, very swift interruption [Nick pushing a pro-business, pro-immigration line] and the following exchange ensued:

Nick Robinson: No, no, no, Prime Minister. You've made that point. You've made it at length in a series of interviews in the run-up to this conference. 

Boris Johnson: [jovially] Hang on, I haven't had the chance to make this point on your show for two years, by your own account. 

Nick Robinson: [sourly] That was your choice not ours.

Nick and Boris then squabbled for a while, interruptions flying, before Boris got a while to speak for about half a minute before Nick made his famous intervention:

Nick Robinson: You have made that point very clearly and I'm going to make...Prime Minister, you are going to pause. Prime Minister...Stop talking! We are going to have questions and answers, not where you merely talk if you wouldn't mind.

Remember that Nick Robinson had been talking for getting on for half of the interview by that stage. 

And that shows [I think] what I strongly suspect, that Nick Robinson had his 'Stop talking!' interruption prepared in advance. My suspicion is that BBC editors encouraged him to deploy it.

After two years of avoiding the programme, Boris might now remember why he avoided appearing on the programme and might well begin avoiding it again.

A nest of singing birds

 

The Atticus column in The Sunday Times brings news of a revealing (if unsurprising) email:

PM and Beeb coo in harmony

Much has been said about Boris Johnson’s war on the BBC, with threats to decriminalise non-payment of the licence fee and appoint critics to prominent positions. But its current leadership appears to think relations are just fine.

Atticus has obtained an email from Tim Davie, the Beeb’s director-general, to David Clementi, then chairman, shortly after the former met the PM in the Commons last September.

His verdict: “It was friendly,” he cooed. “We landed a few points on the importance of the BBC in Covid etc. They outlined some of their thoughts on key messages.”

Davie, 53, added: “At the end, the PM volunteered that we should meet again soon to catch up more generally on the BBC.” A nest of singing birds, then.

Andrew Neil sees it

 

Andrew Neil on Andrew Marr's interview with Boris Johnson this morning:

Another interview with the Government in which the broadcaster’s sole theme is — why didn’t you/don’t you lockdown, sooner, tougher, longer?

I'm watching now, and that's exactly how it's going. 'Sole theme' is spot-on.

"There we have it. An Englishman speaking to a Scot. Thank you and goodbye"

 

The first Andrew Marr Show of the year included an interview with Boris Johnson. 

I'm about to watch the programme, not having started it yet, but I'm already intrigued by this tweet from Alastair Stewart:

Wonder what that was all about? 

Update: I'm getting more intrigued. Ex-Sky world affairs editor Tim Marshall is saying "Marr’s pay off line was odd - ‘An Englishman talking to a Scotsman’.  He seemed a little annoyed."

Further Update: Indeed he did. Here it is in context:

Boris Johnson: You should break out of your characteristic gloom, if I may say so Andrew. Things are very tough. We are going through a very tough period as a country, but I really think people should focus on the amazing fact this country has created a room temperature vaccine which can be used around the world and we now have freedoms that we haven't had for 50 years and there are lots of reasons to be very positive about this otherwise grim new year. 

Andrew Marr: An Englishman talking to a Scot. Boris Johnson, thank you for coming in.

P.S. There were fewer interruptions this time, compared to the famous 1 December 2019 interruptathon which saw Andrew interrupt Boris 91 times. Today there were only 52 interruptions. 

Rob liked it:

Rob Burley: According to Twitter Andrew Marr interrupted the PM too much. Also too little. In reality, I thought it was a suitably tough, polite and fair interview.

P.P.S.  All these interruptions must cause BBC programme editors a few headaches. The World This Weekend played a 30-second clip of Boris Johnson saying something important but along with Boris's words came all those distracting noises from Andrew Marr. We got 'OK', 'So', OK, what might...what might tougher be? What might tougher be?', 'Sure' and 'A...' - and that was one of his quieter passages.

Dystopia

In the brave new world:

• TV channels (the BBC, Sky, al-Jazeera etc) give us 4-hour non-stop coverage of a certain funeral. 
• Al Sharpton tells us that the dead man’s “only crime” was to be born black. 
• On the Today programme Chris Patten (!) suddenly becomes the voice of reason.
• 1q§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§qq (The cat typed that)
• The Times (!) (£) prints: “Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, released a two-minute racist outburst in which he accused police of being “soft-handed” at the protests because there were “too many people who aren’t white”.
• Hmmm
• I don't think Boris is very well. The other day his voice was weak and he looked frail. (No wonder)
• Wake me up when it’s over.

End times

Boris Johnson skipped five Cobra meetings on the virus, calls to order protective gear were ignored and scientists’ warnings fell on deaf ears

Failings in February may have cost thousands of liveshttps://t.co/90fMvq20O5

— The Sunday Times (@thesundaytimes) April 18, 2020

Big splash in the Sunday Times. Get Boris.

A scoop! A day by day; hour by hour diary of the government’s failures and gross mishandling of the pandemic. Boris’s selfish, narcissistic, stubborn deafness! His cavalier behaviour! Hundreds, nay, thousands of unnecessary deaths! Boris’s negligence! The government’s ineptitude!

The keyboard warriors had already been busy, piling in below the line by about 6:30 am! Get Boris!

The whole www blogosphere is full of people (like me) opining on stuff we know very little about. (But how could we? We know only what we’re told.)

“So whom” did no-one anywhere suggest “would have handled the crisis better?” Jeremy Corbyn? Decisive and presidential? He’d still have been ‘having a conversation’.

Andrew Marr, on behalf of the Labour Party, massaged Anneliese Dodds gently through her sermon.

Michael Gove had just been con-fronted by Sophy Ridge with the narrow-eyed stare that makes her look intense.

Marr’s fixers put him in the last slot where the imminent danger of ‘running out of time’ usually adds an extra frisson of suspense. No-one could have been surprised by the tedious predictability of the questioning - the likelihood of Marr getting a sudden surge of inspiration and imagination is next to nil.

“Did he or did he not miss five cobra meetings?” squeaked Marr, the air of triumph amplified by his extra-reedy tone of voice.

So pleased was he with this question that the moment Gove began his answer, Marr had already begun a series of ‘interruption’ noises. Nevertheless, Gove battled through the distraction with stoicism and forbearance.

“Did we not send billions of tons of our PPE to China?” continued Marr. But he had already stopped listening and concerned himself with the Marr Show’s rapidly approaching end time.

Happy Easter

(Not) dropping clangers

In a crisis, everyone realises how much we need a charismatic and morale-boosting leader. 

Why do so many get-well wishers think they have to include a caveat:  “…. Boris has so many flaws, but…..”  

No! Just admit it. Boris is irreplaceable.

************

While Boris is in intensive care and we’re all in lockdown, it seems churlish or crass to obsess and/or carp about BBC bias. Especially as all UK TV channels are responsible for imposing their own bubble-dwelling version of bias upon the public. However, I suppose it’s the BBC that has the most widely-understood obligation to be impartial. 

Here, Douglas Murray concentrates on two non-BBC figures. Channel 4’s Cathy Newman and her absurd attack on (his friend and hero) Jordan Peterson and ITV and Robert Peston’s farcical interview with Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van Tam. 

“Of course there is, and must be, a place in every society for people asking awkward questions. But asking awkward, difficult questions is a different thing from asking the wrong questions, or asking questions which are ill-informed. And perhaps, during an epidemic unprecedented in our lifetimes, and in which very difficult decisions must be made based on highly complex scientific calculations, that kind of gotcha journalism is no longer a public service but a public nuisance. 

Journalism is at a difficult enough juncture, and there are many people in the trade who know a great deal. But the whole profession would be enormously helped if its most prominent representatives stopped giving off the impression of thinking that the primary problem with real experts is that they don’t listen to journalists enough.”

**********

I haven’t watched any of this programme deliberately. Why needlessly rocket one’s blood pressure into the stratosphere? However, Douglas Murray calls ‘Noughts + Crosses’ an ugly work about racism, and ugly works are bad.

********

At a time when everyone who normally comes into the studio in person to unload their expertise is socially distancing, one can’t but notice the backgrounds they choose to sit in front of while filming, in self-isolation, from home. Some home-videoers place the camera lens low, and the backdrop is an attic with a hipped roof; we get a good view of the ceiling. Others sit in front of a bookcase, which signals both virtue and education. Trying to read the titles on the spines, (which I never can) can be distracting. When more than two talking heads are shown side by side on a split-screen, the difference between the head-heights, some at the top of the screen, some at the bottom, the lack of uniformity adds a comical air. (You’d think some general advice would be offered, at least wrt the ‘lighting’.  

So there I am, nit-picking in a crass, churlish and obsessive manner.

******

I still like our Clanger-oronavirus image. So I’m leaving the open thread as it is for now. What I need is a mug of soup.

Worrying times.

Coronavirus: PM admitted to hospital over virus symptoms.

Strategy for a deadly contagion

Alerted by a comment from MB including an H/T to Guest Who and two responses form Sisyphus.

(Yes, Farrow and Ball is posh paint with names like “Elephant’s breath’.  Posh in a Samantha Cameron kinda way, (ideal for one’s shepherd’s hut) but I think the brand might have already been superseded by other, even posher, more subtly-coloured versions, like the one you can get in Aga shops) 

I am grateful to the government for designating journalists as key workers, mainly so @MarinaHyde can continue to do what she does best: pouring industrial paint-stripper on the thin veneer of Farrow and Ballsh*t wherever she finds it https://t.co/Hggx0rBsWT

— Gabriel Gatehouse (@ggatehouse) March 20, 2020

See! I do read the open threads. Honest. I thought I’d like to expand on the topic of Marina Hyde, who seems to be one of Gabriel Gatehouse’s favourite paint-stripperers.

Venomous Guardian columnist Marina Hyde is no stranger to this blog, and before you say anything else, here is one I baked previously.

"I’m reminded of that phrase “It takes one to know one” because I recognise the habit of using excessively emotive and disparaging language to express 'passion' in the most effective way possible because I do the same thing myself in my own bloggeringly amateurish way.

(I might have said ‘startlingly offensive’ rather than ‘effective’.)

The piece in question today is Ms Hyde’s current torrent of Boris-bashing in the Guardian. Here we have a much better example of ‘it takes one to know one’ because it seems that Marina Hyde is accusing Boris of being a flippant, verbose, lying,…….. journalist. 

Why, she even plagiarises ‘spaffing’. All this without realising that she could easily have been outlining her own characteristics and then complaining about them, the difference being that Boris’s rhetoric is humorous, while, well …… you know.

The point I’m trying to make is that as she goes to town on Boris’s inept, incompetent, ineffectual mishandling of the current crisis, she has not offered a single constructive suggestion. So, does she think that Jeremy Corbyn would have handled the situation any better?

Come on! Negativity, negativity, negativity. How helpful is that, Gabriel Gatehouse?

I don't know if Boris is handling this situation well. After all, everyone seems to agree it's unprecedented. Constructive criticism is one thing, but unadulterated Boris-bashing is simply nasty

Sources

Don't open the champagne yet!

Andrew Neil sums up today's lead story in The Times as, "Hilarious! PM moves to protect BBC from his own government". 

It's all about those "sources" again. There are two of them in this latest article. One says, “The PM is not as gung ho on the licence fee as Dom. With Dom it’s ideological — he believes the licence fee should be scrapped. With the PM it’s more reform than revolution,” while the other one says that Boris is personally “cool” on the idea of scrapping the licence fee. 

Much less confusing is John Whittingdale telling The Critic: “There are large parts of the country that haven’t got broadband or indeed choose not to pay for it. You are turning round to all those households that don’t have fast broadband and saying, ‘You can’t get the BBC any more.’ Politically that would be utterly impossible. It is just not possible to make the BBC a voluntary subscription service for as long as it is broadcast on Freeview. We are some way off being able to switch off Freeview and put it all online.”

Meanwhile, the BBC and its allies, including The Guardian and plenty of celebrities, are on manoeuvres. From Labour to the Conservatives, the various posses of the corporation's political friends are also riding to its rescue, all guns blazing. As you've been noting in the comments, even its supposed political critics - Lord Adonis, Alastair Campbell & Co. - have given up their cynical pretence of being anti-BBC and are manning the barricades for 'the Brexit Broadcasting Corporation'. The war is far from over.

"Here are the PM's words spoken by a member of our team"

The stand-off between the BBC and Downing Street continues, with the BBC's refusal to broadcast Boris's Brexit Night address to the nation now extending to a refusal to broadcast any part of it - hence this absurd moment on today's The World This Weekend:

Mark Mardell: On Brexit night Boris Johnson addressed the nation. For reasons we don't need to go into here the BBC is not using Downing Street's recording of that speech, but here are the PM's words spoken by a member of our team. 

Not on the BBC

Worth retweeting as MSM didn’t all show in full. https://t.co/OqukFVSDQY

— Kate Hoey (@CatharineHoey) February 1, 2020

Happy Chanuka

I would like to wish happy #Hanukkah to Jewish people celebrating in Britain and across the world.#Chanukah pic.twitter.com/UfwHrEMNYK

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) December 22, 2019

Britain would not be Britain without its Jewish community. And we will stand with you and celebrate with you - at Chanukah and all year round. pic.twitter.com/S5ClRprCuL

— Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) December 22, 2019

Andrew Marr on social media, that Boris interview and Cuddly Uncle John

The Christmas edition of The Spectator also features a Broadcaster's Notebook by Andrew Marr in which he admits that he didn't see the scale of Boris's majority coming and that he was "over-influenced by social media".

Now, it's all very well pointing the finger of blame at Twitter and Facebook but people choose who they follow on Twitter  and Facebook, and usually do so by following their own biases and inclinations. So if their social media feed turns out to be an unrepresentative echo chamber which then gives back a false, misleading picture of public opinion as a whole then, frankly, such people (including Andrew) only have themselves to blame.

Anyhow, I believe that Andrew was more "over-influenced" by media closer to home - i.e. the broadcast media, especially his own BBC bubble. When he mocks "addicted Twitterati" for obsessing about election froth (such as Boris grabbing a reporter's phone or hiding in a fridge or refusing to be interviewed by Andrew Neil) and assuming that the nation is also transfixed by such 'game-changers', he ought to also be mocking the BBC, Sky, Channel 4, etc, as they went just as overboard on those stories. 

*******

Andrew Marr also uses his Spectator column to comment on Boris 'coming after' the BBC and, possibly, decriminalising non-payment of the licence fee goes. "I hope he doesn't", says Andrew. Hmm.

He then speculates on Boris's motives and says, "I hope it’s not because I frequently interrupted him the last time he was interviewed on my show". He then goes on to defend that interview, blaming its lack of elegance on Boris. 

And he also praises John McDonnell: 

But I take as I find. And I have always found him attentive, polite and prepared to answer hard questions in clear language. 

We have, of course, commented several times before on Andrew Marr's oddly good-natured interviews with the faux-cuddly shadow chancellor, including the strange fact that Mr Marr often takes his dishonest words at face value. Now we know why: because he respects him. (Unlike Boris).