After Dimbers, a Brexit question for Fiona Bruce

Fiona BRUCE is set for a baptism of fire — over allegations of the programme’s political bias — when she takes over as the anchor of BBC1’s Question Time.

Under David Dimbleby, who retires from the Thursday night show this week after 24 years in the hot seat, it has been the subject of intense scrutiny for a perceived anti-Brexit stance.

There are fears among many at the Beeb that Bruce, who also hosts antiques Roadshow, is too lightweight. Particularly, there are concerns over whether she has the ability to maintain what the BBC Charter demands, namely that the public broadcaster does all it can to ensure ‘controversial subjects are treated with due impartiality’.

Last week, during 80-year-old Dimbleby’s penultimate programme, panellist Charles Moore, a former editor of the Daily Telegraph, said: ‘Everybody on this panel except for me comes from a Remain point of view in the referendum ... and therefore they don’t understand why people care about this and they don’t see what the real issue at stake is.’

Fellow panellists were Cabinet minister James Brokenshire, Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti, ian Blackford MP (the SnP’s leader at Westminster) and Jill Rutter of the think-tank institute For Government, which she says has ‘no view on Brexit’.

Hardline Brexiteer Moore could have argued, too, that since the beginning of 2016, there have been only six Question Time panels with more Leavers than Remainers — and just one since the EU referendum.

in response, a BBC spokesperson says: ‘Question Time is not a single-issue programme and panellists are expected to address a range of subjects each week.

‘The BBC is no longer reporting on the binary choice which faced the electorate in the referendum. Question Time gives audiences the opportunity to hold to account politicians from government and opposition parties for the way they are carrying out Brexit.’

i’ll be watching to see who Fiona Bruce’s first panellists are on January 10 . . .