Alastair Stewart

Politics, at its most pathetic, is the Downing Street pack screaming at Prime Ministers, ‘Will you resign?’. At its best, politics and political journalism build up an unanswerable case against a miscreant and take a scalp. The scenes at Clapham Common, last night, were shocking. I have, however, worked in TV news for long enough to know that the cutting room is a minefield. As with vox-pops, the selection and rejection of pictures and voices is one of the most powerful editorial forces in a newsroom. I wasn’t at Clapham Common last night, nor were most in the mass-ranks of social media.

Two big kites were launched by the Sunday Times that could, should they fly, redraw the broadcasting landscape. ‘BBC critics set for top jobs in broadcasting’ its front-page headline announced. The Prime Minister, it suggested, has offered Lord Charles Moore the chairmanship of the BBC and Paul Dacre, the chairmanship of the media regulator Ofcom. Both are former editors of newspapers of the right and neither has much love for what the BBC has become. For some, it is simply an obscene Tory stitch-up. The former Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, was perhaps the most succinct: ‘No process. No joke. This is what an oligarchy looks like.

Jack Kennedy’s 1961 declaration 'We choose to go to the Moon’ was treated with a little more enthusiasm than Boris Johnson’s ‘Operation Moonshot’ pledge this week. Both caused eyebrows to be raised, on cost and practicality. But the former was done, eight years later; the later is, at best, a work in progress – at worst, it is just another pipe-dream. The siren voices, some better informed than others, have already dismissed it on scientific and economic grounds. Others say, like Lenin and the Duke of Windsor, that ‘something must be done’ to scale up rapid and reliable testing if we are to avoid losing a race somewhat more pressing and more vital than the space-race of the 1960s.

The daily coronavirus briefings from Downing Street were wildly popular by one measure, drawing in millions of viewers, but were they any use? Like them or loathe them, it seems that we will be seeing plenty more of them. Boris Johnson has decided that, from October, the 'briefings sessions’ should be televised. Journalists and former spin doctors from all sides have been hailing this as a move which will mean more transparency. But we can also expect to see many of the ridiculous stunts that plagued the coronavirus briefings. Political correspondents often asked the same questions, most seeking a ‘gotcha’ moment in relation to something that should have been done sooner, or better.

Was Emily Maitlis right or wrong to offer her views on the Dominic Cummings's row? The BBC decided she overstepped the mark. But while the corporation's investigation was concluded within a few hours of the programme being broadcast, this isn't a debate that will go away any time soon. And the fallout from this row makes me worry about the direction in which Britain's broadcast media is heading. A constant of Europe's post-1989 'Velvet revolution', which I helped cover for ITN, was the way those rising up against communism fought so hard for control of TV and radio stations. Information is power; control of it helps secure it.