BBC ‘tells interviewers to go easy on Ministers’
BBC bosses are privately telling interviewers to go easy on Ministers over their battle against the virus, former Today programme presenter John Humphrys said yesterday.
The famously relentless interrogator raised concerns that politicians were not being challenged enough.
He said: ‘I’m told BBC bosses are warning interviewers not to put Ministers under pressure.’
The accusation came as former Home Secretary David Blunkett railed against the Government’s now-familiar daily virus briefings from Downing Street.
In an article for The Mail on Sunday, he warns that the briefings, although necessary, were losing their purpose.
‘They are becoming little more than a daily Sermon on the Mount, offering scant new information and, worse, often delivering large doses of hectoring,’ the Labour peer writes. And he warns that the briefings could have the opposite effect from what is intended, adding: ‘The British people have never experienced totalitarianism and topdown diktats, so it’s not in our psyche to be bossed about by politicians. That is why Ministers must get the tone right.’
The Government’s message should be simple – ‘ensure that people who are not living together don’t get close enough to risk passing on the virus.
‘Yet the impression we are given is that we must imprison ourselves in a way which has little to do with safety.’
Writing in yesterday’s Daily Mail, Mr Humphrys – who had a reputation as one of most feared interviewers in the country – also dismissed the ‘ritual’ daily briefings as a ‘pretty inadequate way of getting answers’.
He wrote: ‘The Chancellor Rishi Sunak – supported by his scientific advisers – was able to get away with denying that the Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty had ever said rigorous testing had been vital in enabling Germany to achieve many fewer deaths.
‘Well, he had, and Sunak should have been held to account.’
But he went on to claim that BBC interviewers were being warned by bosses not to put Ministers under pressure.
‘Why? If the questioning is well informed and polite, surely the tougher the better,’ said Mr Humphrys.
The claim was dismissed last night by a BBC spokesman as ‘emphatically not the case, as watching or listening to our interviews demonstrates.
‘It is the job of our journalists to challenge and question Ministers on behalf of the public, while bearing in mind that we are in the middle of a public health emergency.’
BBC sources pointed to Today presenter Mishal Husain’s grilling of Health Secretary Matt Hancock yesterday, when she challenged him that lives could have been saved if the lockdown had started earlier.