“Maitlis broke BBC rules with Cummings rant,” says the front page picture story of the Daily Telegraph and, quite possibly, various other newspapers.
Emily Maitlis, in case you don’t know, is the interviewer on a BBC current affairs show called Newsnight.
On the Tuesday night edition this week, Maitlis launched straight into a diatribe about Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s special advisor (and chief Brexit architect) Dominic Cummings.
Cummings is currently in deep water for having supposedly broken the lockdown rules and his future as Boris’s special advisor hangs in the balance. Some people think he should go; some people think he should stay.
But Maitlis left viewers in no doubt what the correct answer was. She began:
“Dominic Cummings broke the rules. The country can see that, and it’s shocked the Government cannot.”
After a number of complaints over this blatantly biased political commentary, the BBC has issued a mealy-mouthed semi-apology.
“As it was, we believe the introduction we broadcast did not meet our standards of due impartiality.”
No, indeed. Maitlis’s rant was undoubtedly in breach of the BBC Charter obligation “to do all we can to ensure controversial subjects are treated with due impartiality in our news and other output.”
Nothing unusual there, of course: the BBC is forever breaching this particular Charter obligation, especially on the subject of things like climate change.
It’s just normally not quite this blatant. At least on the subject of climate change, it has the fig leaf of being able to claim that it is merely ‘following the science.’ Here, though, there’s little doubt that Maitlis was quite shamelessly politicking on behalf of a particular cause.
Because of his significant role in Brexit, Cummings is loathed by the Remainer Establishment which, even now, is trying to find ways of delaying or even nixing Brexit.
He is loathed especially by the Civil Service because of his avowed intention to slim it down and make more efficient — and less of a law unto itself. Cummings wants to make the public sector answerable to the people who pay for its services: taxpayers. Naturally, the Civil Service would much prefer to be left alone and carry on as usual — being rewarded for failure, having its employees remain largely unsackable, secretly running the country according to its own resolutely left-leaning principles.
My personal view on Cummings is that he is not the hero many of us thought he was a few months ago. Yes, he was great on Brexit but he has proved signally useless since. He has not checked Boris’s leftist tendencies, nixed HS2, cancelled the Huawei deal, poured cold water on the ‘Net Zero by 2050’ lunacy, nor has he drained the swamp of the Deep State. Not only has he failed to do the bracing things he was supposed to do but he has actually done real harm to the economy by agitating for the unnecessary lockdown and for the even more unnecessary quarantine.
As Philip Johnston has written in the Telegraph:
All of those defending Mr Cummings as though he is some doughty champion for ending the lockdown have got it completely the wrong way round. In fact, the excessive caution now being exhibited in No 10 can partly be attributed to him…
and
My beef with Mr Cummings is not that he travelled to Durham but that he is a pivotal figure in a government whose excessively cautious policy is a reflection of his own paranoia.
Yes, quite. I’m astonished how many Brexiteers appear willing to give Dominic Cummings a free pass simply because he was sound on Brexit.
As my brother Dick says, it’s a bit like Father Christmas burning your house down as he leaves through your chimney. “Yes but he did bring those lovely presents,” doesn’t really constitute a defence.
That said, however bad Cummings is, the BBC, Emily Maitlis and the ragbag of Remainer Establishment figures trying to destroy Cummings — most especially his nemesis, Cabinet Secretary (ie head of the civil service) Mark Sedwill — are much much worse.
This is the main reason Cummings deserves our support. Not because he’s good, just because he’s preferable to any of the alternatives.
Yes, Cummings is probably our best hope of keeping this government honest on Brexit — and stopping any unnecessary extensions. But we ought to remember that Brexit is no longer the defining issue of our times. Like it or not we are now living in a post-Coronavirus world where our economic future has been irreparably harmed by poor government policy. It’s remedying that mess as best we possibly can which ought to be our most urgent priority. The era when we can judge a person’s soundness purely on where they fought in the great Brexit war is — or ought to be — ancient history.