Slaughterhouse Live

Can't help but notice that Jeremy Corbyn is an MP but Starmer isn't.

We need to talk about @BBCNewsnight. It seems the majority of last night's episode centred on the re-admission of Diane Abbott to the Labour Party, presented in a heavily-slanted and biased tone. The questioning and comments put words into Abbott's mouth and adopted the most negative interpretation of her version of events. Yet Newsnight has repeatedly refused to report on stories about abuse and misconduct towards Diane Abbott. In August last year I approached Newsnight with copies of messages exchanged on Labour's internal Party messaging system by Paul Ovenden in 2015. At the time I approached Newsnight, Ovenden was the Head of Strategy at Starmer's Number 10. Only a few months before, Starmer had delivered his racist "Islands of Strangers" speech after losing the Runcorn by-election to Reform. Abbott had also been recently re-suspended following comments she made on the BBC (that the BBC then clipped for socials devoid of key context, and again appeared to misrepresent last night). The messages I presented to Newsnight were damning of Ovenden. They show him making deeply unpleasant, offensive and sexualised jokes about Diane Abbott. Yet Newsnight refused to cover the messages. After I was told they had interested Newsnight, I was then told for weeks that they were embroiled in interminable editorial discussions. After six weeks I took the hint: the BBC, without saying it explicitly, weren't going to touch them. It was plainly in the public interest for them to be reported. Indeed, I took the same messages to the great @ShehabKhan at ITV and they leapt on them after I proved their legal provenance and authenticity. ITV's reporting led Ovenden to resign and helped expose the rot in Starmer's "boys club" that would help catalyse his downfall. There was simply no good reason for Newsnight not to report the Ovenden messages, not least because they had previously given extensive coverage to Abbott's suspension and the despicable comments made by Frank Hester. I believe that they chose not to do so because they didn't want to be seen to be attacking the government; or perhaps, it's because too many BBC people had had shared drinks with Ovenden (who had so be in Labour comms) over the years and thought he was a "lad" with protecting? It was because of this background that I was astonished by Newsnight's interview with Zack Polanski this week - another episode where Newsnight was aggressively tone-policing comments made by left-wing figures in odd terms. During a segment in which Polanski was asked to comment on a collaboration on Instagram, Nick Watts interrupted Polanski to read him rebuttal messages sent by an unnamed Reform source live on air. This was astonishing for all sorts of reasons. There was simply no good reason why the Reform (source) was unnamed. But I was genuinely amazed at how rapidly and without any seeming editorial discussion, Newsnight was airing texts in the moment when it sat for weeks twiddling it's thumbs over the Ovenden material. I've seen how the BBC exercises its editorial judgment, how cautious it's many diligent reporters are about due process, fact-checking and impartiality. Yet when it comes to Newsnight, it's all over the place. This past week has been further evidence that Newsnight is a pale shadow of what it once was.