We all know now that Emily Thornberry MP is a gift that just keeps on giving. She and John Prescott seem to have some competition going on as to who can lay claim to ‘most gaffe-prone’ politician of the decade. Thornberry insults her own voters – Prescott hits them. But Thornberry really went for gold at the weekend when she appeared on Sky News programme Murnaghan.
Poor, poor Emily experienced some brain freeze when asked to name her opposite number in the French cabinet, Jean-Marc Ayrault. This is pretty important given that in this glorious reign of Corbyn, Emily is Shadow Foreign Secretary. Emily, however, does not like being shown up for the fool she is, so she went rummaging around in her handbag and grabbed the every handy, now quite torn and tatty, ‘sexism card.’
‘You are asking me a hard question Dermot because I am a girl, and you are just picking on me, and it is not fair!’ These were not her exact words – I was too busy laughing hysterically to listen carefully but you get the picture.
She then threatened to flush Dermot Murnaghan’s head down the toilet if he did not lay off – again something like that. I think that is called doubling down, but by that stage I was under my couch with tears streaming down my face. Ah, Emily, one of the reasons why conservatives will look back at these years as golden is because the Opposition is so pathetic we could do almost anything in government.
But while we are on the subject of Sunday morning political TV, please do stay where you are. We all know the BBC is a ‘far left’ organisation, but you must admire how they are sometimes so subtle about it.
Take the paper review on Marr. It has come to my attention that not only do the lefties always dominate, but the women do also. On Sunday it was Peter Hitchens, Polly Toynbee (who represents about 0.01 per cent of the population) and Gisela Stuart MP. As usual, Polly had her rather ample posterior planted front and centre and was allowed to totally dominate proceedings. She repeatedly talked over Hitchens; it might as well have been a Guardian editorial meeting.
The week before that we had uber lefty, Shami Chakrabarti with journalists Iain Martin and Gillian Tett.
The set up is always like this – two women and a man. The episodes before the summer break are no longer available on iPlayer but that is how I remember it – I certainly remember Tim Loughton MP being positively hen pecked by two women during Andrea Leadsom’s Mothergate.
Now, this is no accident, dear reader. Marr and his crew have pulled a clever trick here. The man is usually ‘on the right’ politically (not always, but usually) and the women are on the left. The women always dominate and the man rarely interrupts because a) he knows it looks bad and b) he is fearful of having the ‘sexist’ card pulled on him a la Thornberry. So they just have to sit there and take it. Every Sunday it is the same – conservative men being steamrollered by some leftie female journo or commentator.
It is made to look all very ‘balanced’ and ‘civilised’, in the same way Mishal Husain on the Today programme is balanced and civilised. But it is just another subtle way that the left/liberal agenda dominates at the BBC. And you can expect plenty more of this if Theresa May keeps up her conservative reforming agenda. It is the only way they can cope.
(Image: Daniel Kruczynski)
