, today’s Daily Mail reports
Minister’s fling with BBC girl who booked him for Newsnight, by Paul Revoir and Gordon Rayner. Some excerpts:
It has emerged tha the BBC has held an inquiry into the role of Newsnight producer Thea Rogers, who booked Mr Purnell to appear on the show – and who just happened to be in the middle of a fling with him at the time.
Mr Purnell, 36, also faces questions over whether he broke ministerial rules by using his chauffeur-driven government car to whisk his glamorous 25-year-old girlfriend off for a romantic meal immediately after the programme…
The ambitious Miss Rogers, who worked for Labour during the 2005 election campaign and is said to be on first name terms with Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, did not tell her Newsnight bosses that she was dating Mr Purnell at the time she was asked to book him as a guest on the show last October.
It is also understood that she may have helped brief Paxman on the line of questioning he should take in the interview. As a result, the BBC has held an internal inquiry into her role – which has cleared her of any wrongdoing.
Sources at Newsnight insisted last night that it was “absurd” to suggest that Miss Rogers’s relationship with the minister had any bearing on his treatment on the show…
“Because he’s worked in the BBC, where he was head of corporate planning before he became an MP, and because she has worked for the Labour Party, they have a lot in common”…
Then Miss Rogers, known during her Oxford days as “trout lips” because of her pronounced pout, was told by her bosses to book Mr Purnell for an interview on the show.
After Mr Purnell’s appearance – which, unusually, was pre-recorded – viewers immediately complained he had not been grilled hard enough.
Sue Bebbington complained to the programme’s website: “I was disappointed that the pensions minister got off so lightly in this evening’s programme”.
“It was a great pity that Mr Paxman did not use his skills to question this further, not just to make the minister’s appearance rather less of an easy ride, but also to highlight the insecurity of occupational pensions schemes”.
A BBC spokesman told the Daily Mail that:
The BBC is satisfied that our employee has done absolutely nothing untoward and that Newsnight’s journalism has not been compromised in any way.
Well that’s alright then. I’m tempted to paraphrase Lord Hewart’s famous quotation, “that justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done”, but I’m sure you get the idea.
Do read the whole thing. See also Talk about Newsnight, 25OCT2006 for other viewer complaints about Newsnight’s pensions coverage that day.
Hat tip to commenter SiN.
Reith? MrMinit?
Anyone…?
“Because he’s worked in the BBC, where he was head of corporate planning before he became an MP, and because she has worked for the Labour Party, they have a lot in common”…
How many Tory MPs have this BBC connection or how many BBC employees have worked for the Tory party?
I’m guessing the answer is close to zero but perhaps Reith can find one to help counter the obvious bias here.
How much further does this have to go before we have an independent complaints procedure to examine the rotten corruption at the heart of the bbc.
I’m assuming that ‘Dave’s’ tories will be getting in at the next general election. Have they got the balls to drain this cesspit? I doubt it.
In Scotland the (Labour) health minister (until she got sacked) lived with the BBC’s head of political coverage. When the then SNP leader married a political correspondent, however, she was shipped out to general reporting in order to avoid a conflict of interest.
If any politician, especially a Tory one, even hinted that they were “going to do something about the BBC” once they were in office, it is not hard to guess what would happen.
The one person who could have dealt with the BBC was Mrs Thatcher, in the mid-1980’s. The BBC should have been abolished along with the GLC, and this country would now be a lot more united, more self-reliant, and more confident.
argus,
Moving Al-BBC to subscription wasn’t possible or cost effective back then. It is now. There isn’t time to waste, every year 3 billion GBP (120,000 slavery years) is extorted from the British public.
Anonymous | 23.01.07 – 7:26 am |
How many Tory MPs have this BBC connection or how many BBC employees have worked for the Tory party?….
I’m guessing the answer is close to zero
Wrong guess.
One former Newsnight presenter was married to a Tory MP. A Panorama presenter is married to a Tory MP. One of Newsnight’s senior politics producers used to work at Conservative Central Office and is the brother of a Tory MP.
Of the ex-BBC staffers holding front-bench positions in the House of Commons 2 are Conservatives and 1 Labour.
jr
Do you think it appropriate that the bbc investigates itself when complaints are made?
it’s only going to get worse now the licence fee has been agreed.
TPO | 23.01.07 – 11:44 am
Do you think it appropriate that the bbc investigates itself when complaints are made?
It depends on the nature of the complaint.
If the check-out lady at Sainsbury’s gives me the wrong change, I’d be happy for a Sainsbury’s customer services manager to investigate.
If the check-out lady were to shoot me, I’d want the Police involved.
In this case there was no complaint as such:
The BBC launched an inquiry after being tipped off about Miss Rogers’s relationship with the minister
The enquiry established that:
She was not involved in the decision to invite James Purnell on to the programme, nor did she produce the item
Case closed then.
Yeah, but no-one forces me to pay Sainsbury’s 130-odd quid a year on pain of imprisonment, whether or not I shop there. I’m more of a Waitrose bloke myself.
RR
I’m more of a Waitrose bloke myself
…..then 185 quid shouldn’t be a problem…
jr
Haven’t got time at the mo to respond fully, but will do so later.
Suffice to say that when I caught Sainsburys out advertising baking potatoes at 99p per kilo yet when weighed the machine produced a ticket for £1.09 I complained to a member of Sainsburys staff who said they’d sort it.A week later they hadn’t. I asked to see the duty manager. He was too busy to see me.
I rang Trading Standards. One week later Trading Standards rang me to say that an order had been slapped on Sainsburys and every Sainsburys weighing machine in the country was now inoperable until they had sorted out the software at Sainsburys HQ.
It had never occurred to me that the weighing machines in each store were hooked into their mainframe for marketing purposes.
A result, but at the hands of an independent regulator, not Sainsburys.
Are you trying to tell me that the bbc is somehow different to Sainsburys, the GMC, the Police, etc etc etc.
Back later with more on this.
by the way case very much still open then
I can defend the BBC a little on the subject of inquiries, as I think any organisation would sooner conduct their own investigation rather than have an outside agency tread all over it for a few weeks. The fault here lies with the Government as well as the Opposition, who are so toothless in front of the BBC that any accountability goes right out of thw window. As JBH would no doubt attest, the BBC’s role in the collapse of the last conservative government is still fresh in all parties’ minds, and none is prepared to make itself unpopular lest the same happen to them.
The structure at the BBC reminds me of the big Trades Unions in the 1970s. The mere suggestion of costcutting or not approving a licence fee increase and a gigantic, and very public, squeal goes up from White City. Maybe an anti-government (from the left of course…) story just to remind everyone on which side their bread’s buttered. The BBC uses cuter tactics too – like its utter failure to investigate Tessa Jowell’s husband in a story that is at least as serious as the Hamilton one. Strangely, we didn’t see BBC reporters camped outside the house, or an attritional campaign of character assassination, like we did during the Hamilton affair. The Opposition, whose leader has been trying like a lovelorn teenager to get into Auntie’s knickers for some time, sits idly by, fearing that any protest will cause the BBC to turn against them, thus costing them a few votes in marginal Trafford. Politicians of principle, my arse.
The BBC has manoeuvred itself into a position of a protected species, just as the Unions held sway in the 1970s and made peoples’ lives a misery. However, the advent of a strong, principled Prime Minister brought an end to all that. I predict that sometime in the future a strong, principled PM can do the same to the BBC.