Watch: Emily Maitlis slams Brexit, the Tory party and the BBC

Well that didn’t take long. It’s only been a few months since the former Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis left the BBC, and already the broadcaster seems to be enjoying her newfound freedom from the corporation’s impartiality restraints.

Speaking tonight at the Edinburgh international television festival, Maitlis used the event to hit out at her former employer for its ‘both sides’ impartiality and said that ‘an active Tory party agent’ was on the BBC board shaping news coverage. Maitlis also accused the corporation of ‘pacifying’ No. 10 after she was found by the BBC to have broken impartiality guidelines for starting Newsnight by declaring that ‘Dominic Cummings broke the rules’ during lockdown.

Elsewhere in the McTaggert lecture, Maitlis suggested that the media’s coverage of Brexit amounted to a ‘conspiracy against the British people’. And she even suggested that we’ve seen ‘politicians move in directions that are deeply and clearly deleterious to basic, democratic government’. Steerpike imagines that she wasn’t referring to the ways MPs attempted to stop the Brexit vote… In one section, when the presenter seemed to get a little carried away, Maitlis even compared the government’s suggestion it may break international law in a limited way to committing a murder.