Fallout from Burley’s rule breach bash grows at Sky
KAY BURLEY and guests at her 60th birthday party have come under attack from a fellow Sky News presenter, who shared a tweet branding them ‘morons’ for breaching Covid rules.
The news anchor, who has been taken off-air after her 60th birthday bash with nine friends on Saturday, left the channel’s editor-at-large Adam Boulton unimpressed.
After Burley’s show was broadcast without her from a hospital on Tuesday, he retweeted a post from a viewer that read: ‘Look at the state of Sky News. The morons spent all summer preaching to us and now look at them!
‘After illegally going on a bender, they were going to go to a hospital to put lives at risk!’
Boulton told The Guardian his retweets did not always indicate approval.
But he added: ‘Certainly my feed has reflected a lot of people who are very concerned about the credibility of Sky News, and that is the important issue – the credibility of our journalism.
‘Sky has worked very hard during the whole Covid crisis and has taken a very clear line about public safety, and obviously something like this perhaps underlines that.’
Sky political editor Beth Rigby, north of England reporter Inzamam Rashid and presenter Sam Washington are also off-air following the party.
Burley is said to have blamed arrangement ‘misunderstandings’ for breaching the rule of six when the party of ten gathered on two tables at the Century Club in Soho.
She reportedly broke the 11pm curfew with a visit to the Folie restaurant 800 yards away before some of the group went to her west London home.
In a tweet, later deleted, the veteran journalist said she had a Christmas holiday booked before the row blew up and likened her critics to lions, writing: ‘Whatever else you read be safe in the knowledge I was always heading for my beloved Africa on Friday to sit with lions. They kill for food not sport.’
Burley said she ‘inadvertently broke the rules’ when she ‘briefly popped into another restaurant to spend a penny’.
Her three colleagues have not commented. Sky said an ‘internal process’ was under way.
In April, Burley asked minister Robert Jenrick if it was ‘one rule for us and one rule for them’ after he broke lockdown rules to see his parents.
Rigby told the PM’s former chief adviser Dominic Cummings ‘people have put up with all kinds of restrictions and hardships’, after he drove to Durham to see his parents in March.