Fiona Bruce shouldn’t be punished for her Stanley Johnson comments

It is not the first time Fiona Bruce has been slated on social media. She has long been accused of being a Tory sympathiser and denounced for impartiality when it comes to party politics. She has also been accused, since Dimbleby’s departure, of being a dreadful chair of Question Time. I am genuinely impartial when it comes to Bruce and have no cause to defend her. But I do have skin in the game when it comes to violence against women. That’s why I think it is wrong that she has now had to stand down as an ambassador for the domestic abuse charity Refuge, after responding to allegations made about Stanley Johnson on Question Time. 

When I heard the journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown on Question Time raise the issue of Stanley Johnson being a ‘wife beater’ I was pleasantly surprised that it had made the cut at all (QT is pre-recorded). Fiona Bruce’s subsequent caveat that the assault was, according to Johnson’s friends, ‘a one off’ was likely pre-scripted (Bruce also said that she was ‘not disputing’ what Alibhai-Brown had stated).