Minister demands showdown over BBC ‘Brexit bias’

CABINET minister Liam Fox has demanded face- to- face talks with the BBC over ‘unbalanced’ coverage of Brexit.

The International Trade Secretary accused the Corporation of ‘wilfully’ ignoring good economic news since the referendum last year and opting instead to run negative views from commentators.

In a letter to BBC director-general Lord Hall, he warned of a ‘clear pattern of unbalanced reporting’.

It is a major escalation of the battle between ministers and the BBC over Brexit coverage since the referendum.

The Corporation was praised for its even-handedness during the campaign but frustration has grown at No10 over coverage in the 12 months since then.

In his letter, Dr Fox wrote: ‘I believe we are seeing a clear pattern of unbalanced reporting of the UK economy and, when it comes to the work of my department, evidence of the Corporation wilfully ignoring positive economic data when we publish it.’

Dr Fox cited two examples from one week, and repeated his claim that the BBC cannot present good economic news without adding ‘despite Brexit’.

He said on July 6, the BBC ‘chose not to report’ the annual foreign direct investment figures published by the Department for International Trade.

These showed a record number of foreign direct investment projects in 2016/17 – a total of 2,265 – into the UK in the wake of the Brexit vote.

Dr Fox wrote: ‘ These figures are an important indicator of the attractiveness of the UK to foreign investors yet, despite routinely dedicating resources to less significant economic publications and studies, the BBC turned down the opportunity to publish the story or take interviews.’

He also pointed to how the BBC handled monthly trade statistics on July 7. His department offered the BBC a comment from Dr Fox on camera while he was in Paris. The BBC, he said, claimed it did not have the resources. He added: ‘Instead the BBC ran a piece and interviewed a commentator who highlighted that the trade deficit had widened.’

He said the figures had also showed UK exports were up nearly 11 per cent in a year. Last week the BBC was criticised over its coverage of inflation after suggestions it would rise to 3 per cent. In the event it actually fell.

Reporters blamed a rise in the cost of living on the fall in the pound since the Brexit vote last June, but Tory MPs said the fall started in 2015.

A cross-party group of pro-Leave MPs who met BBC director of news James Harding this month to complain about distorted coverage said the meeting was a ‘waste of time’ and the BBC regarded its coverage as ‘perfect’.

The News-Watch pressure group examined the business news on Radio 4’s Today programme for six months after the referendum. It said more than half the 366 speakers had been negative about the impact of the vote to leave the EU, while only 16 per cent expressed pro-Brexit views or saw the post-referendum outlook as positive. The BBC disputes this.

A BBC spokesman said: ‘No organisation takes coverage of the economy more seriously than the BBC. We do not recognise the characterisation of our coverage outlined in the letter.’

WE HAVE a female Head of State. A female Prime Minister. A female chief of the Metropolitan Police. And, as of this week, a female President of the Supreme Court.

Yet, according to a furious open letter signed by every one of the BBC’s top female presenters — for which I invite readers to devise an appropriately aweinspiring collective noun — they are suffering from a most offensive form of discrimination.

The cause of their letter to the BBC Director-General Tony Hall is last week’s publication of the pay deals of the Corporation’s highest earners. This, they complain, ‘showed what many of us have suspected for many years … that women at the BBC are being paid less than men for the same work’. Humongous

The most obvious example cited is that John Humphrys is paid more than £ 600,000 a year, whereas his fellow Radio 4 Today programme presenter Mishal Husain gets about a third of that. Still, not too shabby: I speak as a mere male whose fee when presenting Radio 4 programmes is in the hundreds of pounds, rather than the many thousands.

Humphrys’ humongous salary reflects not only the fact that he has been a stalwart of the Corporation for many decades, and presents Mastermind too, but also that he had been wooed by other broadcasters over the years and the BBC felt obliged to sweeten his deal.

That, surely, is the best way the female star presenters can increase their own far from exiguous pay deals. Get some bigger offers — if you can — from Sky or ITV and see how much better you can do.

And if you think your agent isn’t doing enough for you, fire him (or her) and get a more aggressive one. Failing that, do some tough negotiating yourself.

Admittedly, this is something which women, as a rule, seem less prepared than men to do. Their relative reticence on this score has counted against them.

I recall, from my own days as an editor, that it was almost always the men who came to me complaining about their pay, and who solicited offers from competing newspapers in order to strengthen their arm in such negotiations.

However, in my family, I am the pathetic one in such situations — and my wife is the toughie. Whenever I have been offered jobs, I have tended to accept the bid without haggling; and when I have told my wife what happened, she has told me I completely mishandled it.

By contrast, I recall the time when she was last in line for a big job and the chief negotiator for the firm was a contract battle-hardened Hong-Kong Chinese. To my amazement, she got this fearsome financier to double his offer. I could never have done anything like that: I suppose, in part, because I’d have found the process deeply embarrassing.

She does something similar when shopping. Once, we were in a souk and my wife employed her grasp of the local language (she used to sell jewellery in the Middle East) to drive down the cost of a carpet. Haggle

After the deal was done, the salesman came up to me and asked: ‘Is your wife Kuwaiti?’ ‘No,’ I replied, ‘why do you ask?’ ‘Because,’ he said, ‘they are the hardest negotiators in the Arab world.’

But a souk is a souk — and most British women would know that they are almost expected to haggle in a market where there are no fixed prices and where the stall-holders seem to enjoy the process.

The times I have been most embarrassed by my wife’s determined negotiating is when we’ve gone to posh shops in the West End of London — and she has treated those as if they, too, were souks. Once, she wanted to get me a jacket at a very smart tailors. She pulled the one she liked off the hanger and said to the sleekly-dressed and coiffured salesman: ‘What’s your real price for this?’ I backed away and pretended, as much as I was able, that I had nothing whatever to do with this woman. Of course, she got the price down.

Some would disapprove of these tactics. But my wife points out that such a shop is at perfect liberty to refuse to negotiate, and adds that as a West End retailer of many years’ experience herself: ‘I know how big their profit margins are.’

I guess also, that having left school at 16 to go ‘into trade’ (as we used to say), she has not the slightest sense of embarrassment in dealing robustly with such matters.

By contrast, I suspect those female BBC news and current affairs presenters are, like me, people who have gone to university — probably to do an arts degree — and are much more comfortable debating policies with Cabinet ministers than with the nitty-gritty of commercial life. Fearless

I got an insight into this difference more than 20 years ago when my wife and I went out for a dinner with John Simpson. The BBC’s long- serving world affairs editor is notably fearless in his encounters with dictators — or in dressing up as a woman in a burka in order to smuggle himself into Taliban-controlled territory in Afghanistan.

But when my wife began to query something on the restaurant bill in peaceful London, John seemed quite alarmed, even though he knew she was probably right. Like many Englishmen ( and women), this was a form of confrontation he could not handle.

I don’t mean to assert that the BBC’s star female presenters have no justice at all in their protest. The fact that Huw Edwards is on more than £550,000 — or that Alan Shearer is on a similar amount (working out at about £250,000 per interesting comment on Match Of The Day) — is enough to make anyone wonder.

But the appropriate response from the BBC would be to cut the excessive pay of such men: then the female presenters could be happy with what they already get. Failing that, my wife is available for lessons in negotiating.