It’s not healthy for our broadcast media to linger in the Gray zone any longer

WIn his eagerness to blame the Tory Government for a man’s death, Nick Robinson, the BBC ‘Today’ journalist, failed to do basic factchecking

This sort of thing happens if you are a propagandist rather than an impartial presenter

henever he co-presents the BBC’S Today programme, Nick Robinson likes to take sole charge. He sees himself as agenda-setter, news-breaker and prosecuting counsel. He spends so much time “speaking truth to power” that power can hardly get a word in edgeways.

On Thursday, Nick was in classic form. The main story was the final Sue Gray report on Downing Street “gatherings”, on which, over its six-month run, he has barely concealed his personal views. However much the director-general of the BBC, Tim Davie, pleads for impartiality among his employees, our Nick won’t – as he would see it – be gagged.

Before cross-questioning the doggedly low-key Steve Barclay MP, now the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Robinson set the scene with a two-minute-plus monologue. He instructed us that what “still matters, despite the Prime Minister’s claim that he has been vindicated, is the big picture”. That picture was “so big you can see it from outer space”, amounting to “evidence that the Prime Minister’s repeated denials were, quite simply, untrue”. How solipsistic, how utterly Nick-ish, to imagine a Westminster political spat being visible well beyond the solar system.

In the course of the programme, Robinson referred in hushed tones at least three times to a story he had seen in The Critic magazine. This concerned Emanuel Gomes, a Downing Street cleaner who had died of Covid. Auditioning for the role of Mark Antony over the body of Caesar, Nick laid poor Mr Gomes before Mr Barclay. What would the Prime Minister’s chief of staff say to the grieving Gomes family? The Downing Street staff had partied and broken the rules all round Mr Gomes: his family had lost their loved one. In Nick’s media-fevered brain, the story seemed to offer his “Gotcha!” moment, like the death of Dr David Kelly during the Iraq war.

But here Nick Robinson QC had slipped up. Perhaps one of his juniors in the BBC’S equivalent of the Old Bailey had fed him the Gomes story. It was untrue. Mr Gomes had died while working for the Ministry of Justice, not in Downing Street, and apparently of a heart condition, not of Covid.

Robinson had to issue a correction and apology for his errors (though it included no apology to the Gomes family, or to Mr Barclay, whom he had put in a false position, or to ministers and officials who, he had implied, might have contributed to Mr Gomes’s death). On BBC Sounds, Today’s mention of Mr Gomes has been edited out.

We all make mistakes, of course, but it seems reasonable to conclude that Robinson was so greedy for information that might force Captain Boris to walk the plank of the ship of state that he did not check properly. That sort of thing happens if you are a propagandist rather than an impartial presenter. The BBC seems to have learnt nothing since Emily Maitlis’s Newsnight homily against Boris

Johnson and Dominic Cummings two years ago yesterday.

With luck, the publication of the Gray report may bring an end to the hysteria which has all but unhinged poor Nick (although he may still hope – possibly rightly, who knows? – that the forthcoming report of the Commons privileges committee will convict the Prime Minister of lying to Parliament).

One should not leave the subject, however, without doing what Robinson did not do and reflect a bit more calmly on what Sue Gray’s report says.

It certainly is bad for Mr Johnson. The various gatherings examined, she says, were “not in line with Covid guidance at the time”. The events “should not have been allowed to happen”. The fact that they did happen reveals “failures of leadership and judgment”.

It is hard to resist the thought, though Ms Gray does not directly voice it, that a more orderly prime minister would have warned his staff against occasions which risked breaking the rules. The Lord of Misrule, Boris Johnson, will never be able to put this completely behind him, even if he is genuinely contrite.

But less media attention has been paid to the role of officials in this saga. It is a popular misconception that because the Prime Minister runs the country and lives in No10, he is in charge of his office and residence. This has never been the case.

If you think about it, it is not desirable, or even possible. Every prime minister’s job is to govern. Part of the job of the machine that surrounds him is to remove unnecessary distractions. Boris – or any prime minister – would no more organise and invigilate Downing Street events, parties or “gatherings” than he would personally repaint the number on the famous front door.

Officials do all that; and ever since Tony Blair, the number of people working in Downing Street has exploded by nearly four times, so any prime minister’s personal connection with the staff has diminished in inverse proportion.

In the course of Ms Gray’s report, it emerges that it was officials – whom, if senior enough, she names – that organised most of the controversial occasions. One might have expected the irregularities to have been the fault of special advisers – political appointees who tend to be a livelier band than career bureaucrats – but no.

The key movers in most cases were people like Martin Reynolds, the principal private secretary, and Simon Case, the Cabinet secretary. It is slightly comic that emails released by Ms Gray show Lee Cain, the free-wheeling spin doctor, being more cautious than the career bureaucrats.

If I were being cynical – which, in part, I am – I would say that the dominant role of officials in this saga helps explain Ms Gray’s rather restrained tone. Civil servants stick together at almost all costs and she herself is, as she says in her report, “immensely proud to be a civil servant”.

Ms Gray used to be the head of “propriety and ethics” in government.

Her successor in that role, Helen Macnamara, was one of those fined by the police for her breach of lockdown rules. No report by a civil servant is going to be merciless against civil servants.

However, Ms Gray does not shirk the basic facts. These do show the hand of the bureaucracy in the various bits of rather paltry merriment which have upset people. It is interesting to note, in letters published this week, that both Lord Kerslake, the former head of the Civil Service, and Bronwen Maddox, the director of the Institute for Government, have slightly broken Whitehall omertà and suggested that senior officials were at fault. Ms Gray, as one might expect, finds that what went wrong “did not reflect the prevailing culture of Government and Civil Service at the time”, but one gets a feeling that perhaps it did.

I shall end on what is probably an unpopular note. Nothing can excuse some of what happened, but what Ms Gray calls the “extraordinary pressures” do help explain it. All those ministers, advisers and civil servants in Downing Street were, by special exemption, present and working flat-out in terrible circumstances. On the whole, they did more good by being there than did the scores of thousands of officials who left Whitehall during the plague and still, in many cases, have not returned. I cannot feel vengeful rage against them.

Time for a Covid amnesty and to focus on a Government which seems increasingly set on crushing a free economy.