BBC News just gave an unquestioning platform to a piece of pro-Boris Johnson propaganda. It came from one of his new Cabinet members. Of course, his claims were utterly baseless. But the BBC failed to present the other side of the story at all.
Mark Spencer: already shoring-up Johnson
Mark Spencer is the new leader of the House of Commons. Johnson promoted him in his partial reshuffle on Tuesday 9 February. Spencer replaced Jacob Rees-Mogg, who is now in a newly-created role: minister for Brexit opportunities. But already, the new face of this important job is peddling unprovable claims.
Back in December 2021, BBC Radio Nottinghamshire interviewed Spencer. At the time, the Mirror had already broken the so-called ‘partygate’ scandal. In the interview, Spencer defended the PM. BBC News reported that he said in December 2021:
I am assured that everybody in that building played by the rules. I’m told there weren’t any parties. The prime minister will not have lied about any parties.
Of course, we now know that may not be true. Because the Met police are investigating 12 different Downing Street/government parties which may have broken the law. Not that this mattered to Spencer. Because on Wednesday 9 February he was still defending the PM.
‘The public don’t care about partygate’…
He told BBC Radio Nottingham in a new interview that:
When you get out into the real world and you talk to real people, my experience is they are saying to me ‘you know what really matters to me is the cost of my energy bills, the NHS backlog post-Covid, making sure the economy is growing and my job is secure’.
Spencer added:
It’s fair to say Downing Street didn’t get everything right but let’s focus on the real world here.
The hypocrisy of Spencer’s comment about energy bills and the NHS is concerning. Because it’s his government which has caused or is enabling crises in those areas. Moreover, people in the “real world” may beg to differ on Spencer’s assertion that they are less concerned about partygate than other issues. Because since the media broke the partygate scandal, the Tories have nose-dived in almost all the opinion polls.
… but opinion polling says different
The latest poll tracker from Britain Elects shows that the Tories collapsed in the immediate aftermath of partygate breaking. And since then, the party has barely recovered. It’s only recently begun to narrow the gap between it and Labour – with the latter still being around eight points ahead:
Our poll tracker currently has Labour ahead by 8pts.https://t.co/ZJnuJYCSHe pic.twitter.com/rJISFkjbE2
— Britain Elects (@BritainElects) February 1, 2022
As John Curtice wrote for iNews on 3 February, within 48 hours of the redacted Sue Gray report into partygate going live on 31 January, five polls:
found on average that 63 per cent now believe that Mr Johnson should resign.
Partygate even divided Tory voters. As Curtice said:
41 per cent say he should go, 48 per cent reckon he should stay.
The BBC: negligent?
So, on the face of it – the polling does not back-up Spencer’s comments. Yet throughout its article, the BBC failed to mention this or counter his comments at all.
Whatever the editorial reasoning behind this is, the fact that the public service broadcaster failed to present a different side of Spencer’s claims is negligent at best. And it shows the BBC yet again, consciously or not, protecting the systems of power in this country.
Featured image via BBC News – YouTube and Tahir.Bin.Ibrahim – Wikimedia, cropped to 200×78 under licence CC BY-SA 3.0
