Bbc

During the EU referendum, the Sun ran a front page with the headline ‘the Queen backs Brexit’. The paper reported that the Queen clashed with Nick Clegg, who was then Deputy Prime Minister, over Europe at a lunch in 2011 — at which she declared the EU was ‘heading in the wrong direction’. In the days and weeks that followed, the paper received much flak over the legitimacy of the story, with blame being pointed in Michael Gove’s direction. In fact, Clegg later used an interview with the BBC to pour scorn on the story: ‘I mean, the idea that the Queen of all people would even bother to give someone as insignificant as

Although the BBC has traditionally been accused of showing anti-Conservative bias, since Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader the party has found itself waging war with the Beeb on numerous occasions. However, today Steve Baker swung it back to the Tories. The Brexit-backing backbencher used a question at PMQs to accuse the BBC of breaking its charter obligations by trying to ‘create problems for the government’: ‘I’m sure my honourable friend will be astonished if not aghast to learn that a succession of journalists from the BBC have contacted me seeking to create to manufacture stories of backbench rebellion on the issue of the EU. Will he agree with me

It seems perplexing that François Fillon, now the Republican candidate for the French presidency, should be a declared admirer of Margaret Thatcher. Although she certainly has her fans in France, it is an absolutely standard political line — even on the right — that her ‘Anglo-Saxon’ economic liberalism is un-French. Yet M. Fillon, dismissed by Nicholas Sarkozy, whose prime minister he was, as no more than ‘my collaborator’, has invoked her and won through, while Sarko is gone. In this time of populism, M. Fillon has moved the opposite way to other politicians. He says his failures under Sarkozy taught him that France needs the Iron Lady economic reforms which it

There were two items on BBC radio this morning which rather summed up the Corporation thinking about the State of the World. One was a brief but telling discussion on the Broadcasting House programme as to whether our political discussion now is getting to the point where we can’t actually air differences at all;  that, after Brexit and the Trump election, we are so utterly divided ideologically that common ground is impossible to find. It was an interesting conversation between Catherine Mayer, the co-founder of the Women’s Equality Party, and Iain Martin, who, while a Brexiteer, is also opposed to Trump. Fine, except that it was preceded by the secular