More BBC staff than Lib Dems at conference
Liberal Democrat MPs could be outnumbered by journalists from the BBC by a ratio of 25 to one at the party’s conference in September.
The LibDems said that 200 BBC staff have registered to cover the four-day conference in September, despite the party having just eight MPs.
The number of journalists registered to cover the conference in Bournemouth is more than the 150 who were sent to cover the G8 conference in Lough Erne, Northern Ireland last year.
However, the total is fewer than the 270 BBC journalists who covered the World Cup in Brazil and the staff who went to the Glastonbury music festival last year.
The BBC has registered 200 staff despite deciding to scale back its coverage of this year’s party conference to reflect the LibDems’ position after May’s rout at the polls. The party is currently leaderless after seeing its number of MPs slump from 57 to just eight. The LibDems’ conference runs for four days from September 19.
The corporation has decided to axe the nightly conference round-up programme, and will not be broadcasting regularly from the conference. Instead the BBC’s star political interviewer, Andrew Neil, is likely to interview senior LibDem figures by satellite link from London.
A LibDem spokesman said the party was “delighted to welcome” so many BBC journalists to cover its conference at the seaside resort.
He said: “We’re on course to have more members at September’s conference than we’ve ever had, and more first-time new members than ever before. Our party is genuinely excited about heading to Bournemouth to launch our fightback and hold the Tory government to account.
“While the smart suits from Westminster may be turned off by opposition, our membership is growing, by more than half since polling day, and they are coming to conference to show that the liberal voice in Britain is strong and up for the fight.”
But Jonathan Isaby, chief executive of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, questioned the BBC’s use of resources. He said: “Let’s hope sense prevails. If the BBC really do send 200 staff to Bournemouth for a conference with eight MPs, the world will have completely gone mad. “Licence fee payers deserve good-quality coverage of politics, but it seems unlikely they would want quite such an army of employees to descend on the conference.”
ITN said it was planning to send five journalists to cover the conference.
A BBC spokesman said: “We won’t be sending anywhere near 200 journalists. We’ve just registered plenty of names while it’s free, so we don’t incur charges once we know who will actually be attending.”