The ineptitude of despots

Displaying the pristine neutrality that has made her such a popular figure, Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis apparently tweeted the following last week: ‘No. 10 is trying to control the media, and everyone in our democracy should be afraid.’ Sadly, this typically sane and measured observation was later deleted. Was she told to delete it? Or did she think better of it but was not quite up to tweeting: ‘No. 10 isn’t trying to control the media and we should probably all rest easy.’ I wonder how many other tweets she’s deleted before I got around to seeing them? ‘The schools are closed not on account of Covid but because giant Tory goblins are devouring our children. And nobody says anything.’ In Emily’s milieu — the Newsnight office, the BBC in general, her Twitterati acolytes and scullions — the question of bias does not occur because they mistake what they believe for the facts and have no mechanism for separating these two very different things.