Once upon a time there was a little girl called Emily. There she is! (Opening lines to Bagpuss).
SEE EMILY PLAINT
In the world of Britain’s political media, each new dawn heralds something which, like Matilda (who told such awful lies), make one gasp and stretch one’s eyes. Yesterday’s revelation was that the BBC has, and claims to operate in accordance with, ‘impartiality rules’. This is tantamount to being informed that Kim Kardashian has a first-edition Proust in the original French, or that Wayne Rooney has an equerry. What, one thinks, on earth for?
The BBC’s claims of being politically neutral are, as Bertie Wooster would say, pure apple sauce. Confounding Auntie with an unbiased broadcaster is like mistaking Michael Moore for Kate Moss in the half-light. In terms of straightness, the BBC are as bent as a nine-bob note. As they say in legal circles, res ipsa loquitur; the facts speak for themselves.
No real surprise then when chisel-faced uber-harpie Emily Maitlis lost her rag over the fast-fading Dominic Cummings affair. Maitlis is one of the Beeb’s big players, an articulate polyglot who speaks seven languages, including Chinese. Mind you, that is not in and of itself an endorsement. A lot of very unsavoury and duplicitous types speak Chinese. The Chinese, for a start.
A number of aspects of this tawdry offer jostle for attention, but the human element always strikes one. Since Trump got in, and Britain voted to leave the EU, the left have had faces like a wet weekend. As pointed out in this very magazine a few issues ago, the Left run everything, so why the sad visages? Also, the spite and bile etched across Maitlis’s face, which looks like a hanging judge’s death-mask at the best of times, tells of a twisted soul, eaten up inside like a worm-ridden apple. Hatred, in the long-term, is not a healthy emotion.
But, in the end, spite and bile are the fuel of the modern SJW, which is what BBC journalists are. These are the people who exhort you to ‘be nice’ on Facebook before talking about how they would like to set fire to the nearest Tory.
On Cummings himself. He must be aware that he is possibly one of the most-watched men in Britain. The media have more eyes than MI5. Would he have taken this risk knowing the consequences unless he had to? We merely conjecture.
The main danger posed by the BBC is still that it is synonymous with the truth for so many ideologically indentured licence fee payers. Truth is a movable feast now, a malleable affair where the loudest voice is master of games, and the BBC is still Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, all these years down the road.
Maitlis will get her wrist slapped and soon be back, like a star football player pictured at a nightclub the day before a big game. The Beeb is a brand and knows its marketing strategy. The old saw is always wheeled out that it produces great drama and nature documentaries and radio programmes and so on, and that is all well and good. But its news presentation is so brazenly biased it saddens the heart to see it running cover for various questionable concerns, and also to see its visceral ethnomasochism.
Cummings is obviously a devious little shit, but that seems to be the marque in modern politics. The idea that, if the Left get his hairless scalp, it will somehow neutralise his effect on the blustering mountebank Johnson is as mantled with naivety as believing that Donald Trump no longer talks to Steve Bannon. These people are like Hannibal Lecter telling Clarice Starling how to catch the killer from the confines of a high-security prison cell.
So Maitlis becomes the story for a little while, and the media moves on to its next tea-cup storm. What a bore it all is.
Photo credit: Gothyck