, concerning the payment of cash to former Labour frontbencher, Lord Hoyle, formerly Doug Hoyle, a onetime government whip, MP for Warrington and chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, by a lobbyist:
…for an introduction to Lord Drayson, the defence minister in charge of billions of pounds of military procurement, according to evidence obtained by the Guardian.
The story was mentioned briefly in Newsnight’s round-up on Thursday of Friday’s newspapers, but not all, at least not noticeably so, by any other BBC news programme until Friday’s Newsnight, where Michael Crick had a filmed report with various interviews, but played it down, in the subsequent studio discussion, as not much of a scandal.
Experience suggests there’d have been a good deal more interest in this story across the BBC if Hoyle was an eviiil Toreeey. Strange that.
Having done a quick search on both the BBC search engine (ha ha) and on Google, under the BBC domain name, I don’t seem to be able to find this story on the BBC website at all. (Other than a reference to a video)
Sounds like Israel’s Haaretz. Giving the leftist and the Islamonazis some good publication.
This was a strange story. It was all over the Guardian but died almost immediately.
I saw the feature on Newsnight and Michael Crick’s message was very much a case of “nothing to see here; move along now”. His view was that Hoyle is not very well-known, so it is all a bit of a damp squib.
I bet “disgraced Tory MP” Piers Merchant – anyone remember him? – wishes the BBC had applied the same rules to him.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/politics/24589.stm
By the way, are Merchant, Jonathan Aitken, Ann Winterton, Neil Hamilton and Jeffrey Archer still officially “disgraced” according to BBC news bulletins and reports? Or have they finally been rehabilitated by BBC?
And – according to the BBC’s lovely search engine – is John Stonehouse really the only Labour MP to have suffered the ignominy of being described by the BBC as “disgraced”?
The story was covered extensively on Friday night’s PM programme on Radio 4, I recall.
All well and good Scaryduck, but why should it be omitted, it seems, from Friday’s BBC One Breakfast news, the One O’Clock News, the Six O’Clock News and the Ten O’Clock News – TV news programmes with much bigger audiences than Newsnight and Radio 4’s PM programme. Why would that be?
One thing we can be sure of. This story will not be dragged out time and time again on every programme from drama to comedy as an example of how corupt the Labour party is…
Andrew | Homepage | 30.10.07 – 5:09 pm
Whatever you say, Andrew, if the BBC’s aim were to hush this story up, putting it on the PM Programme and Newsnight seems a funny way to go about it.
Restrict the story to outlets which only the politically-committed tune into, but keep it away from the general populace, that sounds about right.
Ronald | 31.10.07 – 11:40 am |
Plus they can say, when critised & in all deviousness, ‘But we put the story out twice on major news shows’. But a couple of hurried items between the shipping forcast and the grain prices don’t really count for much when compared to what disgraced Tories are subjected to.
Also do you notice the hypocracy? Archer is always referred to now as ‘Disgraced Tory Peer’ but Leslie Grantham, a murderer and sexual deviant is always called ‘actor Leslie Grantham’. That’s because he’s served his time and should be forgiven. So murder is forgiveable by the award of a lenghty contract or two but purjury is an unforgiveable sin.
What odd standards.
Well, I hate sounding Beeboid. I am not, and I don’t know why the story died. But the truth is that the lobbyist in question had a parliamentary pass from a Conservative front bencher. Step forward Gerald Howarth. So, why did the Beeb sit on that? Come to think of it, why does nobody on this forum know that?
The BBC chief politcal correspndent was a former young tory. The web politcal correspondent is a former daily mail writer and neil is former conservative party research department member. So he is biased toward the tories not labour.