Crash Bang Wallace
Libertarian political blog from Mark Wallace; political opinion, breaking news and exclusivesBBC’s election night ritual humiliation of Jeremy Vine over for another year
Posted on May 05, 2012Pity Jeremy Vine; one of Britain’s brainiest journalists and host of an extremely popular national radio show, when he became the anointed heir to the fabled BBC election swingometer, he must have thought he was destined to be like Peter Snow, a fabled sage one day retiring to the mountain peaks of election night legend.
It hasn’t quite turned out like that. For some reason, the insightful Peter Snow swingometer process seems to have been replaced with an annual ritual humiliation of Jeremy Vine. I don’t know what he’s done to deserve it, but he seems to be a producer’s piñata.
Emily Maitlis got a rather snazzy touchscreen to present the results as they came in, so Vine must wonder: why me?
On election night 2008, he dressed up as a cowboy to illustrate Nick Clegg’s vote share, putting on a cringeworthy accent and miming shooting cans:
Then there was election night 2007. which took an inexplicable Ali G theme with Vine being forced to present Lib Dem results as “Ming’s Bling”:
This year, at least the embarrassing costumes and attempts to be down with the kids were gone, but they still got poor Jeremy down on his hands and knees on the floor.
Apparently he was tracing the route of a bizarre walk you could do hypothetically do from London all the way to Land’s End without ever passing through a council with a Labour representative – which may, I suppose, appeal to those who plan their rambling on the basis of local electoral geography. If you meet someone like that, do let me know – I’d advise backing away from them slowly, before fleeing for your own safety.
Newsnight’s unasked immigration question
Posted on February 21, 2012Last night Newsnight ran a package on the findings of the Vine Report, the damning outcome of an investigation into flaws in the security of British borders.
One expert interviewee featured condemning the current Government for allowing the problems to continue after the 2010 election was Matt Cavanagh, introduced as a former “Government immigration adviser”.
Now, Matt Cavanagh’s critique may well be right – the Coalition evidently didn’t ask the right questions that would have uncovered these failings in May 2010. But shouldn’t some criticism – perhaps the bulk of it – go to those who oversaw these security breaches opening up in the first place?
Vine reports that the holes in our borders first began in 2007/8. To prevent such a thing happening again, we surely need to know how the problem first emerged.
But who could Newsnight have interviewed about such a thing?
Perhaps we should look at Matt Cavanagh’s full tagline on Newsnight – which was, err, “Government immigration adviser, 2003-10“.
It was fair enough to interview Cavanagh and ask him about the Coalition’s role in allowing the scandal to continue. But why wasn’t he asked about how the problems allegedly started on his watch?
Richard Dawkins, the Pope of preachy atheism
Posted on February 14, 2012With today’s almighty row about secularism, atheism and religion, it seems like an opportune time to repost this article I wrote on why Richard Dawkins does atheism a gross dis-service by acting like a religious zealot.
Dawkins was on the Today Programme this morning, debating with Occupy-luvvy and former Chancellor of St Paul’s. With two of my least favourite public figures fighting against each other, it was a bit like the Iran/Iraq War, in that you rather wish they could both lose, but in the end it was wonderful to hear Fraser expose the absurdity of Dawkins’ illogical approach to attacking religious people. Listen here.
The curse of the Miliband Mix-up, episode 329
Posted on February 13, 2012This blog has long followed the Great Mili Mix-up, the tendency of even the most accomplished commentators to mix up David and Ed Miliband, almost as if the universe itself is trying to set right the error made when the wrong brother was elected Labour leader. So far it’s struck the BBC website, the Today Programme, the Telegraph, the Mirror and even Google Image Search.
The latest in this longstanding tradition is City AM, who illustrate the findings of today’s Voice of the City poll with the wrong Miliband:
The poll finding illustrated with David’s photo reads “69% Disapprove of Ed Miliband’s performance during the NHS reform debate”.
It’s hardly City AM’s fault that the Opposition Leader is apparently one of Britain’s most forgettable men – or were the picture desk just trying to imply a solution to the problem?
Lookalikes: an occasional series
Posted on October 21, 2011Every now and then a famous face you’ve been looking at for years (not continuously, obviously, that would be weird) suddenly emerges as a lookalike that you hadn’t previously noticed. So it was for me, watching the news last night.
I’d never clocked it before, but it turns out the BBC’s North America Editor Mark Mardell bears a remarkable likeness to Family Guy’s Peter Griffin:
Spooky, no?
BBC gives phone hacking 7 times more exposure than the Euro crisis
Posted on July 20, 2011The BBC are obviously smarting from the growing number of allegations that they have covered the phone hacking scandal so much that crucial issues like the increasingly likely collapse of the Euro have been neglected.
Of course many of those allegations are made by people who are themselves uncomfortable politically with the embarrassment being caused by the hacking issue, and of course the phone hacking scandal is absolutely rightly big news. However, if the Euro was to fall over next week with catastrophic economic consequences I suspect much of the public would be wondering how it all happened so suddenly, when in reality this crisis has been brewing for months and years.
The BBC’s Foreign Editor Jon Williams (who is, by the way, well worth following if you’re on Twitter) just said:
Surprised at claim #BBC covered #hacking to exclusion of other stories. Arab Spring, Italian Euro crisis & #eastafrica drought all prominent
It may be an exaggeration to say that other stories have been excluded entirely, but if you look at the evidence it’s pretty clear they’ve been eclipsed by the hacking coverage. Here are the results of searching the BBC News site for references to “hacking”, “euro” and “libya” over the last week:
Libya: 23 mentions
Euro: 32 mentions
Hacking: 246 mentions
As I say, hacking is a huge story and it does deserve large amounts of attention – but it’s hard to claim the BBC hasn’t taken its eye off other major issues while it’s been going on.
Unlike others I don’t necessarily think that’s solely because the BBC is threatened by Murdoch; it’s also because hacking is a media-village story taking place within the world most journalists inhabit. However the BBC in particular has a Charter responsibility to consider the public interest. That isn’t served by neglecting to cover the Euro crisis properly.
The Ed/David Media Mili-Mix-Up Part III
Posted on July 18, 2011Despite the big impact he’s generally recognised to have made on the hacking issue over the last fortnight, it seems Ed Miliband is still having some serious recognition issues even among the political media. After the Today Programme and the internet itself mixed him up with his brother David, and the Telegraph did the same, the effect is spreading.
Guido picked up on the Daily Mirror’s Mili-mixup:
Now the BBC website has managed to follow suit in their live coverage of PMQs:
This is quite funny, but it leaves Labour with a serious question: if even now, at the height of his performance, journalists mix up Ed Miliband with David Miliband what hope is there that the public know who he is?
EXCLUSIVE: Ed Miliband “told BBC he knew nothing about Tunisia”
Posted on March 08, 2011The question of whether British politicians have got a good enough handle on the uprisings in North Africa is increasingly occupying the minds of political commentators. Against that background, I was recently told a fascinating snippet from someone inside the BBC which casts further doubt on whether Westminster is up to speed.
It goes a little something like this…
When Ed Miliband appeared on the Andrew Marr Show back on 16th January, he arrived for makeup beforehand, plonked himself down in the chair and announced “By the way, what’s been happening in Tunisia? I know absolutely nothing about it.”
A slightly shocked silence ensued, with the BBC staff present dually wondering a) how on earth he hadn’t been briefed for a major interview on unrest that by then had been running for a month and had in the previous two days led to the Tunisian President fleeing into exile, and b) whether they should prep Marr to grill him on it as a weak point.
As it turned out, for whatever reason Marr didn’t ask about the topic at all – but it hardly inspires confidence that Ed didn’t know about the topic and, more worryingly for Labour, just merrily announced that he didn’t to the staff of the BBC’s major political chatshow.
I should say at this point that this is single-sourced (albeit from a person who was apparently there at the time) , so it’s further to the tittle-tattle end of the news scale than the hard-copy-leaked-document end, but interesting nonetheless.