It’s been less than a week of Boris as Prime Minister and lefty Remainers have already managed to contract Boris Derangement Syndrome to the degree of making utter laughing stocks of themselves. Over the phrase “war cabinet” used by Tim Shipman on Saturday night…
Never mind the fact that “war cabinet” has been an entirely standard part of the political lexicon for years. And politics as a whole is called “campaigning”.
For those journalists struggling with the concept of metaphor, or historians struggling with recent history, Guido has compiled a handy guide to how to use war metaphors correctly in the eyes of the Twitterati:
Don’t they have any idea how insulting this is to people who have actually died?
Lewis Goodall opines…
“Remainer readers may dislike Mr Farage – they may dislike his style, his rhetoric, his approach – but he cannot be faulted for his appreciation of strategy. If his opponents don’t up their game – and fast – he will beat them, just as he did before.”
SKY News’ Lewis Goodall was charged by an elephant mid-interview in Africa this afternoon. “Off to the sunny Brexit uplands…”
MediaGuido has never quite understood why Sky News, an impartial broadcaster bound by Ofcom rules, allows its political correspondents to opine about how much they don’t like the Tories and Brexit on the “Sky Views” section of its website. Suppose it doesn’t make much difference from their output on telly…
Today, Sky’s Lewis Goodall has written a long attack on Boris. Goodall has decided that Boris “surely knew” what he was doing from the start and that he “intended” the whole row to play out as it did. No actual evidence of this, naturally, and no reporting to justify the claim. Goodall goes on to argue Boris only got away with it because he is posh, compares him to Enoch Powell and says “I give the suggestion that there has been an increase in the numbers of attacks on women wearing the niqab in recent days absolute credibility”. No statistics or reporting to reasonably measure this, obviously.
Some other Goodall classics include “Brexit talks cannot succeed”, written in September 2017. If you’ve ever got the impression that Sky’s political correspondents are a bunch of left-leaning Remainers, you might be onto something… Goodall is a former Labour Party activist and researcher at the Labour wonk shop the IPPR.
Lewis is entitled to his partisan pro-Labour Party views, but why are they being aired by a supposedly impartial broadcaster?
UPDATE:
Indeed, as a Sky News output prod I was categorically told I could not write for a certain conservative leaning professional blog lest there be any impartiality issues. So surprised my former employers are now allowing opinion pieces by reporters with party connections
— Jay Singh-Sohal (@JSinghSohal) August 13, 2018
Responding to Corbyn’s statement that the US should have arrested ISIS leader, al-Baghdadi, John Mann bluntly tweeted:
“Baghdadi blew himself up with a suicide belt. An arrest might have been slightly difficult in these circumstances.”
