Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
The Online Safety Bill, now going through the Lords, will make all this far worse by threatening huge fines for Silicon Valley firms that publish anything deemed to be “harmful” and visible to children. Andrew Neil wrote this week that Lying Bastard has brought “renewed prominence” to the question of how we do political interviewing. Back then, in December 2019, I’d watched Boris Johnson avoid the GMB presenters by hiding in a fridge on an election campaign stop.
Framed across 12 key political interviews of the past quarter of a century, from Thatcher to Johnson via Corbyn and Cameron, Rob asks why, in the space of 30 years, we have gone from a situation in which prime minister Margaret Thatcher sits down for an hour on primetime TV and answers every question thrown at her, to one in which prime minister Boris Johnson hides in a fridge to avoid questions from journalists. Archie is in many ways a formulaic corporate lawyer, taking drugs on weekdays and playing tennis against his firm’s partners at weekends – that he is queer and open-hearted saves him from becoming a caricature. David Cameron, for instance, was not friendly — unlike his chancellor, George Osborne — and remained aloof and self-important while declining to make eye contact. When Daily Politics ended in 2018, Burley became editor of Politics Live, and later editor of The Andrew Neil Show and executive producer of the podcast Brexitcast on television.Ardent and arresting, the resulting chronicle of the lives (and deaths) of a fox, orca, human, mayfly, rabbit, gannet, otter and eel, is one of the darkest, most haunting books I’ve read in a long time. Taking us inside the negotiations, intense preparations and tense encounters between heavyweight interviewers and politicians, Burley reveals why those who lead us are so reluctant to speak the truth and how they try to – and often succeed in – getting away with it. The digital era has put rocket boosters on all this as offending articles are more easily shared by activists. The fact-checking organisation Full Fact said that the false claim originated from a spoof Twitter account. Burley’s book is a droll and vivid first-hand account of the less than stately pas-de-deux between interviewer and interrogator.
Rob Burley was the fly-on-the-wall during some of the most influential and dramatic television interviews of the past 30 years,” said Simons. Following a November 2019 edition of Question Time, claims arose that a Brexit and Boris Johnson supporter in the show's audience was Burley's son. In 1989, as a four-year-old Katja Hoyer visited the observation platform of the television tower in Berlin with her parents, and witnessed protests that would soon contribute to the demise of her native country, East Germany. Once, in desperation, having failed to get her to open up about her love of cricket, he pointed to a poster on the wall about The Archers. A decade after John Humphrys documentary, the question still hangs unanswered: what went so wrong with welfare?Rob Burley claims that an element of the BBC’s core purpose, the interrogation of politicians and scrutiny of policy, is now being “pretty much thrown away”. Only this week, it rejected a column by my colleague Douglas Murray on the grounds that his article somehow violated “community standards on hate speech”. At the same time, many of those politicians who are crying about the loss of local radio journalists are the same people who pushed for the original BBC funding cuts in parliament.
Great Deal 
New Comment