How to spend four tellytax payments in one easy go: Prescott and Reid pocket £250 each for their views on Monday’s conference

(courtesy of the Daily Mail):

After years on six-figure salaries as cabinet ministers, John Prescott and John Reid should hardly be short of a bob or two.

But yesterday it was revealed that both had pocketed about £250 from the BBC to give their views on Monday’s proceedings at Bournemouth.

A source at another broadcaster also claimed that Mr Reid had asked to be paid for a five-minute chat, so the interview was cancelled.

Rival politicians described the BBC’s behaviour as “outrageous” claiming it should not be using licence-fee-payers’ money to pay for party political propaganda.

The BBC claimed that it had paid them in exchange for them being available all day to comment on the events at the conference.

A spokesman said: “They were given a facility fee to cover the inconvenience and disturbance of being available to BBC News for the whole day, and that is not in breach of our editorial guidelines.”

Nice work if you can get it. I’m sure there are plenty of more interesting and worthwhile commenters at the Labour Conference who’d be only too pleased to share their opinions with us via the BBC for free – it’s disgraceful that two wealthy well-upholstered former cabinet ministers with fat pensions coming their way should ask for payment and receive payment from the BBC in this way – in particular a discredited and dishonourable buffoon like Prescott, who most people, the Labour Party included, are only too happy to see the back of.

Perhaps in its apparent drive for honesty and transparency the BBC ought to inform us, its tellytaxpaying customers, when people are being paid (over and above reasonable expenses) to share their opinions with us – there seems to be a coterie of BBC talking head favourites who do quite nicely out of appearance fees – apart from honesty and transparency this might save the corporation some cash and give viewers a wider range of more interesting opinions. Doubtless a public register of payments would be of interest to HM Revenue & Customs too.

P.S. Did anyone see either of these grasping buffoons commenting on the BBC on Monday? I don’t recall seeing them, though I have been somewhat unwell since Monday with an (unrelated) stomach upset.