How could the BBC do this to him?
I’VE been quietly simmering about the BBC’s reaction to the judgement in the Cliff Richard case. It’s been mealy mouthed and self-serving.
This week Michael Grade (Lord Grade of Yarmouth) who was BBC Chairman from 2004 to 2006 wrote a coruscating article about the corporation’s handling of the judge’s condemnation of the BBC. Lord Grade said: ‘The BBC should hang its head in shame.’
And so it should. That sensationalist “scoop” when one of their journalists colluded with police to film the raid on Cliff’s apartment while he was abroad and totally unaware he was suspected of child abuse was a disgrace.
One of the news-gathering team revealed they needed to hire a helicopter so they could get “the money shot”; ie pictures through the windows of police ransacking Cliff’s home and leaving carrying the star’s computers and notebooks.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Cliff’s life has been utterly ruined by the BBC’s “scoop”. It’s disgraceful that a corporation funded by us, the licence-fee payers, should spend our money on such a muck-raking story at the centre of which was a blameless man who’d been neither informed he was being investigated, nor arrested, nor charged.
Lord Grade says that the BBC’s actions were: “One of the lowest points in its journalistic history.” He goes on: “Cliff Richard is now vindicated but will carry for the rest of his life the scars of the BBC’s disgraceful decision to reveal his identity and to show his home being searched.”
Michael Grade declares an interest in that he’s known Cliff since the 1960s. I too declare a much slighter interest; we’ve come to know the man though our friend Gloria Hunniford, who in turn has been his friend for 50 years. He is a decent, kind man, morally without reproach. When he emerged from court, although he had won, he looked ill with stress. His fragility shocked me. The BBC’s arrogance in trying to justify their actions as being “in the public interest” is utter nonsense. They just thought they’d got a massive scoop, albeit the kind they would have frowned on if it had been obtained by a red-top tabloid.
Night after night BBC News claims the moral high ground, loftily talking about the dangers of Brexit, and government austerity (this week their education editor actually implied that the reason five-year-olds are starting school unable to form proper sentences is because of “government cuts”. The idiocy and complacency is breathtaking).
Grade says there is indeed a public interest element to this case – but it’s not trying to smear Sir Cliff. It’s the BBC’s failure to explain its actions to it’s paymasters. That’s us, folks. The licence fee payers. They’ve got an awful lot of explaining to do.
Judge CoRbyn by those he sits with
JEREMY CORBYN has shared a platform with virulent anti-Semite, ant-Israeli ranters who compared Tel Aviv with Hitler’s Berlin. The Labour leader belatedly says he rejects their extremist views.
Hmm. So what was he doing on stage with them in the first place? Would he equally happily sit alongside neo-Nazis as they spat foul abuse of Jews into the microphone? With the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard praising Corbyn? Actually, don’t answer that question.