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.
Perhaps Emily should travel to China to understand a little better about state control of the media and threats to democracy. Not before time, China has soared up the list of countries we hate and is comfortably ensconced in the coveted number-one spot, exactly where it should be. A few years ago it was Russia: Novichok, Litvinenko, meddling in the affairs of other countries and annexing the Crimean peninsula. But we abide by the quantity theory of international hatred and can only properly loathe one country at a time. Our government has annoyed the Chinese (and its thuggish ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming) by affording Hong Kong citizens with dual nationality the right to live in the UK. According to the Chinese, this is in contravention of the 1997 treaty we signed upon giving Hong Kong back to its motherland.
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