The toxic dust has settled, so let’s look again at Andrew Neil’s scrap with Jeremy Corbyn.
For an indication of how it went, #Corbyncarcrash was trending on Twitter yesterday. That alarmed the journalism students in my session – “Oh God, Jeremy Corbyn’s been in a car crash!” some cried. They’d been hashtag-had, you see.
The consensus in yesterday’s newspapers was for “car-crash”, although “horror show” offered some variety.
Standing in lickspittle line were the usual shifty suspects. The Daily Express doffed its cap to ask: “Has Corbyn horror show gifted Boris keys to No 10?” (weary footnote: surname for Labour leader, pally fake first name terms for Tory leader).
The Daily Mail devoted nine pages to the interview – nine whole pages, heavens, almost as many as for rumours of a royal tiff or a regal baby’s first fart. It concluded the Labour leader’s policies had been “torn apart” and that Corbyn had “floundered repeatedly”.
If you belong to no party but would like to vote Labour, it was discouraging to see Corbyn still unable to kill the anti-Semitism row by simply saying sorry. You can only conclude that he won’t because: a) he isn’t particularly sorry; or b) he feels this scandal is a put-up job designed to bring him down.
Whatever the case, it remains distressing that this row has only grown under Corbyn. Repeatedly tweeting, as his supporters do, that “no one is more anti-racism than Jeremy” doesn’t help get him out of that hole. Saying sorry might have got one foot out.
As for the rest of the interview, it’s there on i-Player under ‘news’ should you wish to watch. Andrew Neil does his usual impersonation of an ageing overweight bulldog, snarling and grandstanding, a banner-sized pink tie hanging where his too-tight collar should be. And Jeremy Corbyn remains mostly polite and unflustered, although he lets himself down by not delivering that apology to British Jews.
Watching the head-to-head encounter brought two conflicting thoughts. One: how good to see a proper journalistic interview with tough questions instead of all that social media soft-soap pretend journalism (Johnson’s the worst for that). Two: and yet, saying that, wasn’t it all just the Andrew Neil and His Pet Ego Show, more preening and posturing from the star inquisitor rather than a proper interview?
Writing in last Sunday’s Observer, columnist Kenan Malik, always a good read, drew telling parallels with the weightier approaches taken by TV in the 1970s. This link is also made by Steve Richards in his excellent book, The Prime Ministers.
In the run-up to the 1975 referendum on Britain’s membership of the Common Market, Tony Benn and Roy Jenkins spent an hour in a special Panorama debate, chaired by David Dimbleby. A proper, in-depth discussion of the sort rarely seen in our fly-squatting age.
In contrast, the Neil/Corbyn interview was a swift 30 minutes, choreographed to advantage the interviewer over his subject. This wouldn’t matter if Neil had interviewed Boris Johnson on the following night. But no Johnson interview has yet been arranged, leading to anti-BBC conspiracy theories (and what a lot of those there are on Twitter).
It is being reported that Johnson has been approached by the BBC, but no interview has yet been scheduled. If, as some on the left believe, Labour agreed to an interview on the assumption that Johnson would also be getting a filleting, then something is wrong here. Shouldn’t interviews with all the leaders have been confirmed first? So far only Corbyn and Nicola Sturgeon have had the privilege (Sturgeon was lacerated too).
Corbyn and Sturgeon deserve credit for putting their heads in the lion’s mouth; and Johnson deserves condemnation if he doesn’t place his head in the same unfriendly location.