Newsnight’s Lewis Goodall was clearly out of the loop last night and is responsible for this nonsense going round this morning that Hancock only announced the restrictions late last night via Twitter. That you can read about them in papers that went to print hours before Newsnight went on air suggests that he was completely wrong about it. His muddled report says more about him than Hancock:

Last night’s announcement by Matt Hancock – which was made via a pooled TV interview, not a tweet as Starmer is claiming – last night means four million North Westerners are waking up this morning to find a new semi-lockdown has been imposed, meaning families in Greater Manchester and parts of West Yorkshire can no longer meet up, either in private or in public. The full details of the semi-lockdown were released by the Department for Health last night…

This morning one northern director of Public Health told the Today programme he first learnt about the lockdown of four million people via the news.

The left – both political and press – is claiming Matt Hancock only announced the lockdown via his personal Twitter account; completely ignoring the pooled clip he did for broadcasters before the social media announcement and the statements given to newspapers earlier in the evening. Admittedly greater details would have been appreciated by everyone, with specific confusion over whether different families could meet up in public spaces like pubs and restaurants – a question eventually clarified “two households should not go to hospitality together“. Some are already claiming in all seriousness that the two-family pub ban is a deliberate anti-Eid strategy by the government…

UPDATE:  Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham has said this morning that Matt Hancock spoke to him and Sir Richard Lees (Manchester’s Labour leader) at tea time yesterday.

Following the embarrassing apology the BBC eventually gave over the partisan and inaccurate opening monologue to Wednesday’s Newsnight, Guido decided to dig deeper into the institutional problem with the BBC’s flagship show. Trawling through the last 100 tweets and retweets of top presenter Emily Maitlis, Guido found just one that could arguably be positive about Boris (a retweet of New Statesman journalist Stephen Bush criticising Labour’s education policy), whereas 31 criticises the PM. Meaning 96.8% of tweets which were not neutral were anti-Boris.  Many of those classed as “neutral” included editorialised criticism of Donald Trump… 

Guido’s research did not pick up a single retweet of a centre-right commentator, although there were many retweets of commentators and journalists from left-wing newspapers, as well as left-wing campaign accounts, from Joe Politics to the UK Labour Party. This is before getting started on former Labour activist Lewis Goodall…

It’s now being reported the BBC has hired former executive Richard Sambrook to review how it maintains impartiality on social media as the corporation becomes increasingly concerned their left-wing reporters are “discrediting” the corporation. The BBC can pay Sambrook for the service, or Guido and his co-conspirators will continue to do it for free…

*96.875% (31/32) of her last 100 tweets that expressed a pro or anti-Boris stance were anti-Boris.

Newsnight are not having a good week, Emily Maitlis is nowhere to be seen after her partisan monologue was roundly denounced and disowned by BBC management. Emily was ranting as a prelude to a characteristically slanted package by Lewis Goodall. He jumped on an erroneous early report from The Telegraph that the police had found against Cummings, claiming it fully justified his Newsnight report. Going on to demand acknowledgement from the Prime Minister himself that he was right:

Alas for Lewis the early report was wrong. Durham Police did not provide him with the vindication for which he and his Newsnight colleagues were hoping. The twit has now deleted the twaddle he tweeted…

After yesterday’s furore over Panorama, Guido sat down to watch Newsnight, anticipating having to Google whether the producers had once again gone to a communist activist for help finding nurses to interview. After much hype from Goodall on Twitter about his exclusive interview with frontline health staff, Guido was very disappointed to find out the two interviewees were kept anonymous. Canny move by the BBC to prevent further accusations of selection bias, avoid having to explain the questionable guest vetting in by preventing external scrutiny altogether…

There’s nothing like a global crisis to get people to change their perspectives on the world. Guido is delighted to see some fellow journalists now understanding the needs of a modern democracy, backing broadcasting No. 10 press briefings; ensuring information can get through to the public properly. Time to ditch the archaic filtering, spin, and delay the typical private embargoed briefings create…

After today’s lobby briefing – in which the PM’s official spokesman u-turned on the PM’s words yesterday and said there is “zero prospect” of restrictions on travelling in or out of London – both journalists from BBC Newsnight and the FT have called for the briefings to now be televised to “maximise chance of these messages getting through.”

On the topic of the Lobby, for the benefit of the more clueless members of the cartel who claim Guido’s write up of Downing Street’s Lobby truce broke an ‘on background’ restriction, Communications Director Lee Cain agreed after the event to allow his “time for a truce talk” to be on the record. You only had to ask…