Now that she’s gone from the BBC, Maitlis is free to say everything she couldn’t say with just perpetual eye-rolling, sharp interjections and exasperated sighs every time someone Right of Center was foolish enough to enter the studio. Delivering the MacTaggart Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival this week, she criticized her former employer for apologizing after opening a show with a furious monologue against Dominic Cummings’ “trial” lockdown trip to Barnard Castle. This, he argued, was evidence of “Tory competition” at the heart of the BBC. As it happens, many of us who decried Cummings’ violation of his own inhumane rules also felt that Maitlis’ rant violated the company’s impartiality guidelines. He went too far. An even more intelligent Emily prefers to blame the BBC board “where an active agent of the Conservative Party … now sits, acting as an arbiter of the BBC’s impartiality”. Well, if there’s a cigar-chomping, Churchillian bulldog-stroking diabolical Tory mastermind among the anemic ranks of vegan Corbynists, he’s not doing an awfully good job, is he? There is no evidence, so far, of BBC bias towards the government. Round-the-clock punishers for Boris (and, soon, Liz Truss) are more his style. (I must have missed the outcry among BBC journalists in 2013 when former Labor Secretary James Purnell became BBC director of strategy.) It is very disappointing to hear a senior journalist in a republic complain that, in the 2016 referendum, the BBC would create a “false equivalence” by putting a pro-Brexit economist on air to debate an anti-Brexit economist. Hearing both sides of the argument? We can’t have that. License payers just need to be informed of what virtuous people like Maitlis think. I’m afraid Maitlis is the Meghan Markle of broadcast journalism. While presenters like Sophie Raworth quietly get on with the job (I have no idea what Raworth’s views are), Maitlis aspires to be an American-style presenter with a dedicated trailer for her ego. She is the wannabe star who turns interviews into a story for herself. The BBC, which now so absurdly condemns the Right’s relapse, gave Maitlis a famous platform and an audience of millions. In her new, smaller booth at LBC, the presenter can be as partial and political as she wants because, finally, she will be speaking to a select audience who agree with Emily Maitley. Herself.
Vindication for lockdown skeptics
Thank you, Rishi Sunak. Cynics will say this is a very convenient time for the outsider in the Tory leadership race to reveal he has been fighting a lonely battle in the Cabinet, repeatedly sounding the alarm on the lockdown. The cynics have a point, but I’m telling the truth, even if he missed the first bus, it’s always an improvement on lies. And the British people were deliberately misled for two crazy years, as Sunak’s bombshell interview in The Spectator reveals. As a lockdown skeptic, sunk into a pretty severe depression from constant personal abuse, I feel happy to have been officially confirmed that I won’t go crazy. There was indeed an express directive to ministers to pretend that the unspecified draconian measures “followed the science” (don’t mention the negative results!). And anyone like me, who dared to challenge that consensus, was “a crack.” The real firecrackers turn out to be the Sage advisory group of Marxists and mountaineers who have eliminated every dissenting voice from their meeting minutes. Sage authorized a campaign of fear so out of proportion that it made Sunak worry if anyone would dare leave the house again. “It was wrong to scare people like that,” Sunak tells Fraser Nelson, “And I said it was wrong.” When Rishi became emotional at a meeting about the traumatic effect on children of school closures and the horrendous NHS delays, he was met with a wall of silence. Why didn’t he speak up or resign? Collapsing during a national emergency would have risked accusations that he was irresponsible or that he was making leadership maneuvers. Sunak is unlikely to win the race to become prime minister, but he scored an important moral victory. The cluster bomb effects of the lockdown on our society that he warned about have come to pass. I feel a little better knowing that a sane, principled man was fighting the good fight against overpowered, unelected forces that caused a terrifying national psychosis. We had a right to know. We should be thankful Sunak told us.
Negative discrimination
The final word on a university system that denies our own young people opportunities while filling its coffers with fees from foreign students (many who don’t even meet basic English language requirements) comes from Christopher, a Telegraph reader. Christopher, who lives in mainland Europe, tells me that his son received a UK offer (high grades) and an overseas offer (lower grades, much more money) for the same course at the same Russell Group university. His son Christopher is extremely academic and luckily achieved his British A-levels. Well done! What an indictment, huh?
