The Remainstream TV media’s hysterical anti-Boris Johnson obsession is nothing less than an attempted coup… Across the BBC, Sky, ITN and Channel 4, the nakedly partisan Partygate coverage is relentless, writes MICK HUME
Sky News’s hysterical Partygate coverage saw Sky’s political editor, Beth Rigby, repeatedly ask Boris whether he would resign. She is understandably less keen to talk about her own transgressions
On any number of issues, from his taxation policy to his apparent obsession with reaching net zero, I am profoundly at odds with Boris Johnson. But this week, I found that for once I wholeheartedly agreed with him.
At the end of his speech to Tory MPs before the confidence vote on Monday, the Prime Minister asked them to ignore the siren voices of their TV screens and smartphones when it came to deciding how to cast their ballot.
‘Let us,’ implored Boris, ‘refuse to dance to the tune of the media.’
What he meant was ‘Don’t be swayed by the broadcast news media’s relentless obsession with Partygate, by the unending succession of anti-Boris commentators who have filled the airwaves for as long as we can remember, or by the constant carping over Brexit — something they consider the work of the Devil’.
And he was right to say so. For no self-respecting politician should dance to the media’s tune. In a democracy, MPs are accountable to us, the electorate, not to a handful of elitist political editors on TV and radio, or self-appointed ‘influencers’ on social media.
In the event, Boris’s words failed to have their desired effect and the huge number of Tory MPs who voted against him have damaged him beyond measure.
But I can’t help feeling that, in the febrile atmosphere of the Westminster hothouse, a number of the 41 per cent of Tory MPs who plunged the knife into the Prime Minister will indeed have danced to the tune of the Boris-hating media, even though many of them actually owe their position to the fact that he delivered Brexit and won the election with an 80-seat majority.
In effect, they tried to remove a premier with the greatest popular mandate since 1987 at the behest of the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky and Twitter.
Whichever side you’re on, it is bad news for democracy.
There are plenty of things that this Conservative government should be criticised for.
In the real world outside Westminster, from the Red Wall to the traditionally Blue shires, people are justifiably angry and disappointed with Johnson’s administration.
ITV political editor Robert Peston has been firing off a constant stream of tweets so infused with bitter anti-Boris bias that it is hard to decide whether he sees himself as a cheerleader for the Tory backbench rebellion or the actual convenor of it
Not only over its hypocrisy in relation to its lockdown rules, but over far bigger issues from the cost-of-living crisis to the broken promises about ‘levelling up’ and problems with his incomplete Brexit deal. That public anger is expected to be reflected both north and south in two by-elections later this month.
But whatever anybody thinks of Johnson and his government, the relentless, overblown campaign being waged against him over Partygate is a serious cause for concern.
This is not the objective journalism on which our broadcasters once prided themselves. It is a partisan propaganda war that looks about as confected as the cake at Boris’s infamous nine-minute birthday party.
It was way back in last year that ITV News did itself proud with a genuine scoop, by breaking the story of Downing Street parties being held in defiance of lockdown regulations in 2020. It had a huge impact and people made their minds up about it pretty quickly.
Yet more than six months later, broadcasters are still constantly trying to whip up outrage and consternation about Partygate.
It is as if the BBC, ITV, Sky, Channel 4 and Twitter have all been infected by a virulent strain of what Elon Musk calls ‘the woke mind virus’. And they are determined to spread it through the viewing public, starting in Westminster.
To my mind, news broadcasts from the ‘Remainstream media’ have come to resemble something like the telescreens pumping out one-note propaganda messages in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The BBC, of course, has been keen to maintain its prime position as the Boris-Bashing Corporation throughout this long-running affair.
Mishal Husain, host of Radio 4’s flagship Today programme, was supposed to be interviewing Tory minister Simon Hart about the Government’s plan to tackle illegal immigration
Back in April Mishal Husain, host of Radio 4’s flagship Today programme, was supposed to be interviewing Tory minister Simon Hart about the Government’s plan to tackle illegal immigration.
But even on that subject she couldn’t resist shoehorning in Partygate. ‘Why should people stick to legal migration routes,’ Husain demanded, ‘when the Prime Minister himself has acted outside the law?’
When the hapless Hart tried to dispute the implication that Partygate meant Boris might be the moral equivalent of cross-Channel people-smugglers, she laughed at him.
Over on BBC TV, Panorama broadcast a special edition to greet the publication of Sue Gray’s damning report into Partygate. In this bizarre piece of political melodrama, former Downing Street staffers were interviewed with their faces and voices disguised, as if they were hiding out, at risk of retaliatory attacks.
Meanwhile, BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg reacted to their tales of drinking in Downing Street with the hushed tones and horrified expressions normally reserved for wartime atrocity stories.
BBC Europe editor Katya Adler, a critic of Boris and an opponent of Brexit from the off, has been wheeled out to warn us how damaging Partygate will prove for relations with the European Union.
This is the same Ms Adler who, in January 2021, at the height of the Covid pandemic, effectively sided with EU bureaucrats in the row over vaccines, accusing Johnson of unjustifiably ‘berating’ the EU for its idiotic political rejection of the Oxford Astra-Zeneca vaccine.
The BBC could not even bear to give Boris credit for his Government’s extraordinary achievement in rolling out vaccines across the UK while the EU dithered and postured.
After Boris won the vote of confidence this week, BBC reporter Geeta Guru-Murthy was outside Parliament demanding to know how any Tory MP could still have dared to support ‘a man who’s lied to the Queen, lied to the House of Commons, lied to the public’.
Johnson loyalist Lee Anderson MP was one of the few prepared to call out this Partygate obsession on air. ‘The BBC,’ he declared, ‘has had it in for Boris from day one. It’s been a massive witch hunt by you, and the Labour Party, and the mainstream media. Even now, you’re not going to let this drop are you? You’re going to go on and on and on. It’s quite sad.’
Indeed it is. And the big commercial news broadcasters have been no better.
In between broadcasts, ITV political editor Robert Peston has been firing off a constant stream of tweets so infused with bitter anti-Boris bias that it is hard to decide whether he sees himself as a cheerleader for the Tory backbench rebellion or the actual convenor of it, praising MPs for attacking their leader on Twitter in ‘the most clinical and damning terms’.
Peston has even tweeted wistfully about the ‘days or [sic] yore’ when Tory prime ministers told to resign by the party’s men in grey suits ‘did the decent thing and retired to their offices with the bottle of whisky and the revolver’.
But then, for Peston, the fact that Boris is still in power post-Partygate proves he is not only an indecent PM, he is also head of an ‘elected dictatorship’. The President Putin of Britain, perhaps?
Meanwhile, Sky News’s hysterical Partygate coverage saw Sky’s political editor, Beth Rigby, repeatedly ask Boris whether he would resign.
She is understandably less keen to talk about her own transgressions, when she was suspended from our TV screens along with top Sky News presenter Kay Burley, for attending the latter’s birthday knees-up during lockdown. But why let that get in the way of delivering a sanctimonious sermon?
BBC Europe editor Katya Adler, a critic of Boris and an opponent of Brexit from the off, has been wheeled out to warn us how damaging Partygate will prove for relations with the European Union.
Her deputy at Sky, Sam Coates, has been busy making a spectacle of himself in Downing Street, shouting mad rhetorical questions — ‘Are you proud of this Government?’; ‘Is it see no evil, hear no evil?’ — at Cabinet ministers as they enter and leave No 10. It is as if Alan Partridge has been brought to life as an anti-Boris nutcase.
For its part, Channel 4 News has a long track record of Boris-baiting and Brexit-bashing.
It replaced Johnson with a block of ice during an election debate on climate change (after refusing to allow former environment secretary Michael Gove to join). On election night in 2019, when the exit poll predicted Johnson’s sweeping triumph, Channel 4’s ‘balanced’ studio audience could immediately be heard gasping and booing in disbelief.
Channel 4 News veteran Jon Snow stepped down as anchor after publicly joining in a chant of ‘F*** the Tories!’ at Glastonbury Festival. But his successors have carried on in that same spirit of ‘impartiality’ while engaged in relentless trench warfare over Partygate.
It is on Twitter, however, that Leftist, Boris-despising media types have really run riot.
It is typical of Westminster’s isolation that many Tory MPs should mistake this playground of the commentariat for the real world, and allow themselves to be swayed by it.
The reality gap between the Twitterati and the rest of us was starkly revealed this week, after Conservative minister Nadhim Zahawi told Sky News that Ukraine’s President Zelensky would be ‘punching the air’ to celebrate his ally Johnson’s win in the vote of confidence.
Cue outrage from Left-liberal sorts on Twitter, condemning Zahawi and the Government as ‘utterly contemptible’, ‘loathsome’, ‘disgusting’, ‘desperate’ and ‘delusional’ for daring to make such a suggestion about their hero.
Sam Coates has been busy making a spectacle of himself in Downing Street, shouting mad rhetorical questions — ‘Are you proud of this Government?’; ‘Is it see no evil, hear no evil?’ — at Cabinet ministers as they enter and leave No 10.
They were still screeching right up to the moment Zelensky made clear that he is ‘very happy [Boris won the confidence vote]. He is a true friend of Ukraine’, adding ‘I’m glad we’ve not lost an important ally’.
From the Today programme to Twitter, the addiction to Partygate has led to an outpouring of political prejudice dressed up as reporting. These media outlets have all been busy making mountains out of woke molehills, and hoping to bury Boris under a rockslide.
Why else would they have shown such unstinting fascination with the Downing Street parties, yet next to no interest in Labour leader Keir Starmer’s ‘Beergate’ bash in Durham?
Some of us have long believed that the Government’s worst offence was not breaking its own lockdown rules, but imposing those draconian and often irrational measures on the rest of us in the first place.
The broadcast media cannot even address that question, however, because back then the very commentators now berating Boris over Partygate were the loudest and most zealous voices demanding that he lock us down faster, harder and for even longer. They all bear a heavy responsibility for the mess that we are in.
This endless concocted scandal is no less than an attempted coup, instigated by the Remainer media elites who loathe Boris as the symbol of Brexit.
They became obsessed with Partygate because they see it as a stick with which to beat Boris, and one that could help persuade Tory MPs to get rid of him — without leaving it to the unreliable electorate to decide who is our Prime Minister.
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