COMMENT
Brace yourselves. Emily Maitlis is not a Conservative. Who could possibly have deduced during 16 years of impeccable impartiality in the Newsnight presenter’s chair that, all along, she was an aggrieved Remainer, seething with contempt for the Brexit vote and living with her investment manager husband in the socialist republic of Notting Hill? Honestly, you could have knocked me down with a hand-plucked, ethically sourced Siberian goose feather!
Now that she has left the BBC, Maitlis is free to say all the things she couldn’t convey merely by perpetual eye-rolling, glowering interjections and exasperated sighs whenever someone Right-of-centre was foolish enough to enter the studio. Delivering the MacTaggart Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh TV festival this week, she lashed out at her former employer for issuing an apology after she opened a show with a furious monologue against Dominic Cummings’s “eye-testing” lockdown trip to Barnard Castle. This, she claimed, was evidence of “Tory cronyism” at the heart of the BBC.
As it happens, plenty of us who deplored Cummings’s breach of his own inhumane rules also felt that Maitlis’s fire-breathing rant violated the corporation’s impartiality guidelines. She went far too far. A still-smarting Emily prefers to blame the BBC board “where an active agent of the Conservative Party … now sits, acting as the arbiter of BBC impartiality”.
Well, if there is a diabolical Tory mastermind chomping on a cigar and stroking a Churchillian bulldog amid the anaemic ranks of vegan Corbynists, he’s not doing a terribly good job, is he? No evidence, so far, of any BBC bias towards the Government. Round-the-clock punishment beatings for Boris (and, soon, Liz Truss) are more its style. (I must have missed the outcry among BBC journalists in 2013 when former Labour minister, James Purnell, became the BBC’s director of strategy.)
It is pretty dismaying to hear a senior journalist in a democracy complain that, during the 2016 referendum, the BBC would create a “false equivalence” by putting one pro-Brexit economist on air to debate with one anti-Brexit economist. Hearing both sides of the argument? We can’t have that. Licence-payers should simply be told what virtuous people like Maitlis think.
I’m afraid Maitlis is the Meghan Markle of broadcast journalism. While self-effacing presenters like Sophie Raworth quietly get on with the job (I have no idea what Raworth’s opinions are), Maitlis aspires to be an American-style anchor with a dedicated trailer for her ego. She is the wannabe star who turns interviews into a story about her. The BBC, which she now so absurdly condemns for Right-wing kowtowing, gave Maitlis a prestigious platform and an audience of millions.
In her new, smaller booth at LBC, the presenter can be as partial and political as she likes because, at long last, she will be talking to a select audience that agrees with Emily Maitlis. Herself.
Vindication for lockdown-sceptics
Thank you, Rishi Sunak. Cynics will say this is a very convenient moment for the underdog in the Tory leadership race to reveal that he fought a lonely battle in Cabinet, repeatedly raising the alarm about lockdown. Cynics have a point, but I say the truth, even if it missed the first bus, is always an improvement on lies. And the British people were deliberately misled for two crazy years as Sunak’s bombshell interview in The Spectator reveals.
As a lockdown sceptic, plunged into quite a serious depression by constant personal abuse, I feel glad to have it officially confirmed that I wasn’t going mad. There actually was an explicit instruction to ministers to pretend that unevidenced draconian measures were “following the science” (don’t mention the knock-on effects!). And anyone like me, who dared question that consensus, was “a crackpot”.
The real crackpots turn out to be the Sage advisory group of Marxists and mountebanks who eliminated any dissenting voices from the minutes of their meetings. Sage authorised a campaign of fear so disproportionate it had Sunak worrying whether anyone would dare to leave the house ever again. “It was wrong to scare people like that,” Sunak tells Fraser Nelson, “And I said it was wrong.”
When Rishi got emotional in a meeting about the traumatic effect on kids of closing schools and the scary NHS backlogs, he was met with a wall of silence. Why didn’t he speak out or resign? Breaking ranks during a national emergency would have risked the charge that he was irresponsible or on leadership manoeuvres.
Sunak is unlikely to win the race to become prime minister, but he has scored an important moral victory. The cluster-bomb effects of lockdown on our society that he warned against have come to pass. I feel a little better knowing that a sane, principled man was fighting the good fight against over-mighty, unelected forces which induced a terrifying national psychosis. We had a right to know. We should be grateful that Sunak told us.
Negative discrimination
The last word on a university system which denies opportunity to our own youngsters while filling its coffers with fees from foreign students (many not even held to the basic English-language requirement) comes from Christopher, a Telegraph reader. Christopher, who lives in mainland Europe, tells me his son received one British offer (high grades) and one Overseas offer (lower grades, loads more money) for the same course at the same Russell Group university. Christopher’s son is extremely academic and, luckily, he made the British A-level grades. Well done, him! But what an indictment, eh?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/08/25/emily-maitlis-meghan-markle-journalism/
Emily Maitlis is the Meghan Markle of journalism
She aspires to be an American-style anchor with a dedicated trailer for her ego, a wannabe star who turns interviews into a story about her