Newsnight in new bias row over reporter’s attack on Government

THE BBC is at the a fresh impartiality row after Newsnight’s policy editor wrote an article for a Left-wing magazine attacking the Government over the exam crisis.

Lewis Goodall’s piece for the New Statesman was billed on the cover as an examination of “how the Government’s ineptitude created a lost generation”, and was headlined: “How a Government led by technocrats nearly destroyed a generation of social mobility.”

Goodall, who previously worked for the Left-wing Institute for Policy Research think tank, wrote: “We cannot know the extent of Dominic Cummings’s involvement in this sorry episode, and it may be that he was not part of it at all. But his approach encapsulates a method of governing that was on full display throughout.”

The article was signed off by BBC management, who insisted it fell within its impartiality guidelines. But it was criticised by Sir Robbie Gibb, former director of communications at No 10 and a former head of the BBC’S Westminster

unit, who said: “Is there anyone more damaging to the BBC’S reputation for impartiality than Lewis Goodall? This is so off the scale I don’t even know where to begin.” Sir Robbie’s brother is Nick Gibb, the schools minister.

This accusation of political bias follows Emily Maitlis’s monologue attacking the Government’s handling of Cummings’s lockdown trip to Durham.

She was reprimanded by BBC bosses.

The BBC said Goodall had followed “the usual internal BBC processes” by referring the article to management for approval. They said it complied with the editorial guideline that states reporters and presenters should not offer “personal views” on political topics but allows them to “offer professional judgments rooted in evidence”. Goodall wrote that all parties were culpable and likened it to the Windrush scandal, with “the same impersonal regard for circumstances”, and said: “I am left with a reminder of how monstrous the state can be.”

Yesterday, Goodall tweeted: “Thousands of people have had their lives ruined by this. It suits certain people to, yet again, make this a media story rather than engage with substance.”