The BBC’s highly suspect guest selection for last night’s flagship debate has been under scrutiny after Guido uncovered Abdullah from Bristol’s tendencies for Zionist conspiracy theories and blaming women for being taken advantage of by men. Now Guido can reveal that the person who asked the final question wasn’t exactly an ordinary member of the public…

The panel were accused of having no democratic mandate by Aman Thakar. It turns out that not only was Thakar a Labour Party council candidate in 2018 in Southwark, he even worked in Labour HQ. As this letter sent in October 2018 from Labour’s Acting Head of Disputes to a party member under investigation for anti-Semitism reveals:

The General Secretary has appointed Aman Thakar, Legal Assistant, to arrange conduct of the Party’s own investigation.

A source who worked in Labour’s complaints department at the time says Thakar was “uber partisan” and claims he was brought in by Shami Chakrabarti to help “close down” cases of anti-Semitism. The BBC’s dubious excuse for letting Abdullah slip through the net is that his Twitter account was only reactivated after the programme. How did their background checks manage to miss the fact they’d got a Labour Party appointee on?

UPDATE: Turns out the BBC’s background checks didn’t miss the fact that yThakar had worked for Labour, according to Henry Zeffman they just didn’t think it was either a problem or worth informing viewers about. One partisan Corbynista is a mistake, two starts to look like….

UPDATE II: Aman has now deleted his tweets, unfortunately for him not before Guido got this. Aman describes himself as “a nationalist” in this tweet:

Tip for BBC researchers when doing vetting, search for the word “Hitler”….

UPDATE III: Aman apologises for Hitler joke tweet.