Johnson will govern like he campaigned, by running away from the press.
He’s barely back from his post-election Carribean holiday but we it is already clear that Boris Johnson will govern as he campaigned – by hiding from the press.
After Boris Johnson chickened out of an interview with Andrew Neil during the election campaign, his ministers are now going to avoid appearing on BBC’s Newsnight.
According to the Mail, the government’s excuse for this is that Newnight has appointed a journalist called Lewis Goodall as its policy editor and he’s apparently too left-wing.
Goodall has joined Newnight from Sky News, where he worked as a political correspondent for right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch.
The government’s evidence that Goodall is anti-Tory, the Mail says, is that he is the “author of a string of aggressively anti-Tory comments on social media”.
So what did he say? “F**k Tory scum. All hail Corbyn.”? No, just the kind of reasoned criticism every political journalist makes about any party. The most anti-Tory example the government/Mail could dig out is this one:
And of course, he’s also been critical of Labour too. He called Labour’s election performance “lamentably bad” and accused Corbyn of looking “stiff” and “robotic” at Prime Ministers Questions.
The government/Mail’s other piece of evidence against Goodall is that, when he was a student, a Guardian profile described him as a “Labour activist”.
But plenty of political journalists used to be active in politics in their youth.
Today Show presenter Nick Robinson was the chair of the Young Conservatives and the BBC’s Andrew Neil used to be a Conservative Party researcher and now edits the right-wing Spectator magazine.
Yet Johnson dodged Neil’s election interview and his ministers have been told to avoid Robinson’s Today Show. So it looks like it’s not Lewis Goodall but any media scrutiny they are afraid of.
This impression is reinforced by government moves to change the location of press briefings from parliament to Downing Street – where they can control the guestlist more tightly.
At present, any media outlet with a parliamentary pass can attend government press briefings. If they’re moved to Downing Street, publications which displease the government could be disinvited.
If this is the case, let’s hope that the favoured journalists and outlets stand up for press freedom and boycott the briefings.
Joe Lo is a co-editor of Left Foot Forward
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12 Responses to “Johnson’s government continue to hide from press scrutiny by dodging Newsnight”
Michael McManus
The excitable chap above needs to use a dictionary. Fascism is the ideology that calls for complete unity within the country, state control of loyalty, belief, politics and social behaviour – including rigid hierarchies, typically male or clerical.. It does not permit any endeavour in commerce, business, art, literature or thought to depart from the One Big Idea.
There is not one item of Conservative of politics that fits that list. Not one. It is the election-losing Labour manifesto that wants state control of just about everything. It is leftist and LibDem students who have demanded no-platform for views they don’t agree with. Since Iran is in the news, you don’t need to be a genius to see that it is a typical fascist state, as are the other 50 plus Muslim ruled countries. Yet the Labour Manifesto (election losing, though we hear from MPs that it was popular) does not mention the Islamic fascists here in Britain (some of whom have been mourning the dead Shiite) but worries about the ‘far right’. What far right? The far right that has stabbed no one, blown up no teenage dance hall, driven no truck into shoppers, not gang raped a single schoolgirl of the 19,000 victims identified last year alone? That one?
I live where Tories have been elected in Labour seats for the first time since 1066. One of the reasons is the ordinary folks here know perfectly well how the economy works and what civil servant control would bring, and they also know who the villains are. They didn’t vote for people who lied to them.
Nicola Key
The Fourth Estate is very troublesome with all its questioning and criticism. And some of those working in it didn’t even vote tory – shock!