The most enjoyable thing about appearing on BBC One’s Question Time? It’s after the recording of the show when panel members sit down with QT host Fiona Bruce to enjoy supper over a glass of wine or two.
I’m sure the audience leave the venue believing that we participants continue the hostilities once the cameras stop rolling and even off set. It just isn’t the case. I’d known some of those I appeared with last Thursday for years and we’re all grown up enough to put the politics aside from the personal.
Take the rather fabulous Mariella Frostrup, a veteran broadcaster and acclaimed campaigning journalist. You couldn’t wish for a nicer and more fun person to sit down to dinner with – if you’re talking about anything but politics.
Mariella’s contribution to the programme was to make the case for refugees, particularly women from the Democratic Republic of Congo, to come here.
She complained that there were no legal routes for those women who’d been raped during conflict. Sadly, such women number in the many tens of thousands, not just in Congo, but around the world. Does she really think we should open our borders to them all?
She also seemed to admire the chutzpah of the illegal migrant who’d been returned to France as part of Starmer’s risible one-in-one out scheme and found his way back here on small boat again, now claiming he’s a victim of modern slavery.
Well, if Mariella ever wanted to stand as an MP, good luck with getting elected on that manifesto!
Sadly, like every champagne socialist I know, she was speaking without, I suspect, her own life ever having been particularly impacted by the out-of-control number of asylum seekers and illegal migrants arriving here and the knock-on effect on already over-stretched public services, especially the NHS and housing.
The majority of arrivals are economic migrants, males of working age, many of them from countries where women are treated as second-class citizens and some of whom regard white British women with contempt at best.
Mariella is married to a very successful human rights lawyer, lives in a house in leafy Somerset, and I am sure that her financial status means that if she can’t get an NHS appointment, she could pay for a private one. As ever, it’s easier to be a liberal bleeding heart if you can afford it.
In that sense, she’s not unlike your average QT audience member.
The audience – who apply by phone or online – is selected based on how they have voted in the past, how they intend to vote in the future, whether they are members of a political party and how they voted in the EU referendum. The aim is to achieve a range of views and spread of political opinion.
However, it’s long been the suspicion in Westminster that the Left ‘game’ Question Time. It is obvious that the audience is overwhelmingly supportive of Left-wing panel members.
I believe this happens because more zealous members of Left-wing organisations or their sympathisers put themselves forward while declaring themselves to have voted for a right of centre party at the last election.
This blatant audience bias undoubtedly has contributed to viewing figures having halved in recent years, despite the valiant efforts of Fiona Bruce, who is an excellent chair.
There is a way for Question Time to fix this problem – by having an audience made up of a percentage of members of respective political parties based on the poll ratings of the previous week.
Public opinion shifts so quickly in a world of rolling news that the BBC should not be relying on an outdated model of selection. Membership of political parties or organisations should be checked and proof of membership provided at the time of application and entry to the venue where the programme is filmed.
Of course, a balanced audience is the last thing many in the BBC will want. And the sad thing is that while they resist, what was once one of the best political programmes on television will become even more of a dinosaur and entirely irrelevant in the national debate.
The Beeb shouldn’t shoulder all the blame for disappearing QT viewers. When I was an MP I was told that my job when appearing on the programme was to dig in and play a defensive game. Just survive the ordeal and get to the end in one piece. This was achieved by giving answers that are as bland and brief as possible. The goal was to not make a major gaffe and embarrass your party and yourself. To my own cost, having entered politics not as a careerist but as a former nurse and businesswoman, they were rules I never abided by. And yes, I’ve made the odd gaffe or two.
Nowadays, as far as MPs are concerned, the goal seems to be not only digging in but ensuring they get a half decent 30-second video for their Instagram and TikTok feeds. The Question Time set is after all, an iconic backdrop and that, rather than meaningful debate, is what matters.
Oops, Britney’s ex did it again
Kevin Federline, ex-husband of Britney Spears, has published a memoir about life with her and their two sons.
This is the man who abandoned his fiancee with a young child and when pregnant with their second, to run off with the super-rich, megastar.
Forgive my scepticism, but surely failed rapper K-Fed is intent only on exploiting his links to Spears while he can.
Initial reports reveal scandalous claims about the star attempting to breastfeed while taking cocaine and standing watching her sons sleeping while holding a knife.
Britney, whose recent bizarre behaviour on social media suggests that her well-documented mental health problems persist, disputes such accounts.
What a fine upstanding decent chap he isn’t to do this to the mother of his children.
We’re all common, don’t you know…
World-renowned interior designer to the royals, the rich and the Russians, Nicky Haslam is about to release the seventh edition of his Christmas ‘Common’, tea towels, which are rapidly becoming collectors’ items. I have six of them and not one has ever met a wet plate.
The tea towels list the things that over the last year Nicky has decided are common. Past offenders include metallic pen on dark invitations, baby showers and the Welsh Guards. I once asked Nicky, who is a very close friend: ‘Am I common, Nicky?’
‘Darling, we are all common,’ he replied.
Having been given a sneak preview of Tea Towel No. 7, I can reveal this year’s ‘common’ gems include Stonehenge and storm names.
Just say no to Andrew and Fergie
The delusional sense of entitlement of both Prince Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson defies belief. Why on earth should the King house either of the disgraced pair on the Crown Estate with taxpayers footing the bill?
And yet they have one powerful ace up their sleeve. Andrew, reportedly his mother’s favourite, has lived through every royal drama of recent decades, while Fergie was at one time close to Princess Diana.
If either of them was to kiss and tell all, it would be sensational, miring the Firm in yet more controversy.
It would also further damage the standing of their daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie.
My hope is that the King has the strength to say ‘no’ to Andrew and Fergie’s reported demands in return for quitting Royal Lodge. They both need to distance themselves from the Royal Family entirely. Their life of entitlement is over – they brought it on themselves and they should accept it.
