Steerpike

Well, that was…interesting. The BBC’s flagship political interview show, hosted first by Sir David Frost then by Andrew Marr, relaunched this morning under Laura Kuenssberg. On paper, she had it all sorted: she secured an interview with leadership frontrunner Liz Truss after she had pulled out of one with Nick Robinson just days before. It was a decent interview, as you’d expect from a former BBC political editor. It felt like the first interview of her premiership. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Crime is on the rise in London but spare a thought for the real victim in all of this: Cressida Dick. The former Metropolitan Police Commissioner quit her post in February after a string of scandals on her watch. But an independent report has today claimed that she 'felt intimidated' into resigning after an ultimatum from London mayor Sadiq Khan. The report, written by the former chief inspector of constabulary Sir Tom Winsor, says: In my view, in this case, the commissioner faced political pressure from the mayor to resign, that pressure being of a character and intensity which was effectively his calling on her to leave office, outside the established statutory procedure and contrary to the wider legislative scheme.

Throughout the leadership contest, Liz Truss has been all too keen to paint herself as a Brexit queen, keen to slay the dragons of Brussels. Yet Mr S has been doing some digging into the Foreign Secretary’s past and it transpires she was rather more of a Europhile than previously revealed. Truss even headed up a pro-EU group that backed the Maastricht Treaty while a student at Oxford University doing PPE. Despite being a late convert to the Brexit cause, the PM-in-waiting was once an active Liberal Democrat and pro-European. As a blue stocking girl in the mid-1990s she was a key player in the federalist Oxford Reform Club, even being snapped alongside Theresa May's controversial EU negotiator Olly Robbins when the pair were students.

The winds of change are blowing through Paddington, with news reaching Steerpike of something of a bloodbath over at GB News. The self-proclaimed 'People's Channel' is currently undergoing a shake-up in its personnel and programming, with staff being told today of changes to take effect from the beginning of next week. All individual shows between midday to 4 p.m are to be effectively scrapped and replaced. Stars Gloria De Piero, the former MP, and economics journalist Liam Halligan will therefore no longer work on their current shows: instead they will both expand on their work on other features. De Piero also gets to co-host a new weekday show, titled simply: 'GB Newsday.

With a week to go until a new prime minister enters 10 Downing Street, the frontrunner Liz Truss has been criticised so far for limiting her media appearances – instead focussing on meeting the membership and making plans for government. So her decision to belatedly agree to a BBC interview with Nick Robinson won her praise. As the former BBC political editor wrote in this week's Spectator: '[Viewers] want to see and hear their leaders questioned, challenged and tested about the decisions which shape their lives. Credit to Truss and Sunak for agreeing to just that.' Alas, it appears Robinson spoke too soon. This evening the BBC has announced that Truss has pulled out of the interview which was scheduled for prime time on Tuesday evening.

Things aren’t exactly going well for Nicola Sturgeon at the moment, with bin strikes underway across Scotland leaving half the country festering under piles of rubbish. Which perhaps explains why the First Minister was so keen to skip the country yesterday, leaving the difficult business of government behind her to open a glitzy new Scottish ‘Nordic office’ in Copenhagen. The office is the ninth Scottish ‘international hub’, and is expected to cost £600,000 a year. Exactly why Scotland needs a Nordic office is rather less clear to Steerpike – but one rather suspects that endless amounts of taxpayer money can be bunged away in Scotland as long as it helps Nicola Sturgeon pretend to be a statesman on the world stage.

Well, there you have it. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, has confirmed that Facebook did indeed censor news of the New York Post’s 2020 Hunter Biden laptop story. But The Zuck had a rather curious tale to tell. Appearing on The Joe Rogan Experience, Zuckerberg was questioned by Rogan on Facebook’s approach to fake news and misinformation. In the discussion, the question of Hunter Biden’s laptop arose.

Well that didn’t take long. It’s only been a few months since the former Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis left the BBC, and already the broadcaster seems to be enjoying her newfound freedom from the corporation’s impartiality restraints. Speaking tonight at the Edinburgh international television festival, Maitlis used the event to hit out at her former employer for its ‘both sides’ impartiality and said that ‘an active Tory party agent’ was on the BBC board shaping news coverage. Maitlis also accused the corporation of ‘pacifying’ No. 10 after she was found by the BBC to have broken impartiality guidelines for starting Newsnight by declaring that ‘Dominic Cummings broke the rules’ during lockdown.