Lots of rumblings after the New Statesman unveiled their frontpage cover story about the government’s exam “ineptitude”, with graphics accusing the government of lying and describing them as having created a “lost generation”. The furore was sparked because the inflammatory headline was above Lewis Goodall’s byline – who despite consistently acting like an independent comment writer, currently remains the BBC’s supposedly impartial Newsnight policy editor. Downing Street sources detest him as a hostile opponent.

Back in 2007, the BBC banned Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis after one solitary outing in the Spectator the weekly right-of-centre rival to the Statesman, with the corporation saying “Emily should never have been given permission to become a contributing editor to the Spectator, or any other magazine.” At the time, the Guardian reported:

“After the Hutton inquiry, BBC journalists were banned from writing about political and controversial events in newspapers or magazines.”

The single most controversial issue in politics this week has been the government’s inept handling of the exam grades issue, the very issue that is the cover story in the Statesman under Lewis Goodall’s byline. How can we trust Goodall to be impartial on television on Newsnight when by day he writes for a left-of-centre magazine on the controversial issue of the moment? The only difference Guido can see with the Maitlis case is the different political slants of the Spectator and the New Statesman. The BBC’s press office has been contacted for an explanation and has yet to respond…

Newsnight made a lot out of an incredible statistic: that the UK had more deaths yesterday than the entire EU. The problem is the numbers are nonsense. The FT has exposed reporting on the continent to be littered with “flawed data”…

In fact some of the data in foreign countries is so dodgy that, according to the FT’s data guru John Burn-Murdoch, if England had adopted Spain’s new ‘method’, it would have reported just 20 new deaths yesterday. England is equivalent to 13% of the population of the EU, and yet would appear to have just 6% of the death rate, if it adopted Spain’s manipulated reporting…

Newsnight is supposed to provide analysis that goes behind the headlines, did no one at Newsnight not think the data was suspect? Was it just “too good to check” and they just preferred the Twitter buzz…

UPDATE: Newsnight sourced the dodgy data from controversial website ‘Worldometer‘, a website that even Wikipedia editors have decided to avoid. The data manager for independent statistics website Our World In Data told CNN that “We think people should be wary, especially media, policy-makers and decision-makers. This data is not as accurate as they think it is.” Take note, Newsnight…

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…

As British politics nears a full week of talking about Dominic Cummings, the peak of the scandal appears to have passed. Nick Watt reported on Newsnight last night that the group of anti-Cummings Tories are conceding defeat, while the Prime Minister’s performance at the liaison committee yesterday appears, despite the grandstanding from MPs, to have been the watershed moment many in government were hoping Monday’s Rose Garden speech would be. Even Keir Starmer appears to be now saying it’s time to draw a line under this episode…

The BBC appears to be seeking to calm the backlash to the partisan nature of Emily Maitlis’ monologue on Newsnight last night, deleting the clip they had posted on Twitter. Maitlis herself is more defiant, retweeting another clip of it posted by a pro-EU campaigner. The monologue was so partisan that it was shared by Momentum’s Facebook page with the caption “she said what we’re all thinking”…

BBC journalists used to pretend to impartiality and let partisan guests debate an issue. Now the BBC’s flagship news programme regularly opens with an opinion piece, delivered direct to camera by the host. As Chris Snowdon puts it, “Newsnight is now starting with a monologue telling you what you are supposed to think. We’re being forced to pay for a left-wing version of Fox News.” Quite.

If readers wish they may submit an Ofcom complaint by clicking here…

UPDATE: BBC statement says the broadcast “did not meet our standards of due impartiality”