Tories warn BBC to avoid bias for May’s appearance
THE Conservatives have made an official complaint to the BBC about the “biased” audience in Wednesday’s leaders’ debate and warned there must be no repeat when Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn appear on a Question Time special tonight.
The Daily Telegraph understands that Fiona Hill, the Tory election campaign communications chief and joint chief of staff to Mrs May, ordered staff to make the complaint as party sources said there was “fury” about a Left-wing bias in the audience.
The BBC confirmed it had also received a number of complaints from viewers about the programme, which featured a debate between six party leaders and Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, standing in for Theresa May.
The Conservatives are now concerned that the audience might be similarly biased against Mrs May at tonight’s Question Time.
A senior Conservative source said: “It would be hard to underestimate the anger within the party at how imbalanced the audience was.”
The 135-strong audience was vetted by Comres, an independent pollster, which claimed the audience was divided along the lines that people voted at the 2015 general election.
However, a briefing note by Comres said that Labour and Conservative voters were “roughly equivalent”, meaning Labour had a higher proportion in the audience than at the election. Comres also admitted that the Conservatives were outgunned among the audience by Left-of-centre supporters of Labour and the Liberal Democrat, Green, Plaid Cymru and SNP parties.
Iain Duncan Smith, a former cabinet minister, said yesterday: “The BBC should make extra efforts to ensure that they have a fully unbiased and properly balanced audience on Friday because what really came across the other way was an audience that was predominantly anti-conservative.
“It did the programme no good but we were left with lots of chanting, shouting and whistling – that meant that it became very one-sided.
“They have a duty to ensure this is balanced, and these moments will be held up for scrutiny subsequently.”
The programme was filmed in Cambridge, a Labour marginal where the Liberal Democrats came second in the last election and the Tories a distant third. Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, said the audience was “the most Left-wing audience I’ve ever seen”.
Andrew Hawkins, chairman of Comres, admitted that Ms Rudd and Ukip leader Paul Nuttall “were up against a more vocal crowd”.
He said: “Sometimes people on one side of the spectrum are reluctant to make as much noise as people on the other side of the spectrum.”
Tonight’s Question Time is being held in York, an area which voted to stay in the European Union at last year’s referendum.
A BBC spokesman said: “The Question Time Leaders Special, with Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn, is a very different programme from the election debate with only one party leader on stage at a time.
“The majority of the audience will be Labour or Conservative, meaning the party leaders will have an equal number of their supporters … we are confident it will be fair and balanced.”