In search of New Goonsberg: Praise for Laura Kuenssberg and preemptive predictions about her successor reveal the myopia of the British political media...
In search of New Goonsberg: Praise for Laura Kuenssberg and preemptive predictions about her successor reveal the myopia of the British political media...
There's a vast gulf between what hacks value and what reporting should be like.
Last night, The Guardian’s Media Editor Jim Waterson — who is well-sourced at the BBC1 — published a story suggesting its Political Editor, Laura Kuenssberg, is set to move on from the role. He reports:
Laura Kuenssberg is in talks to step down as BBC Political Editor after six years and become a presenter on the Today programme as part of a major reshuffle of senior on-air staff, individuals with knowledge of the negotiations told the Guardian.
With characteristic understatement, Waterson notes:
Kuenssberg’s tenure as BBC Political Editor, during which she has covered a febrile period of politics including the Brexit referendum and two general elections, has coincided with unprecedented scrutiny of how the BBC’s political journalism shapes the national news agenda.
Kuenssberg replaced Nick Robinson as Political Editor in 2015, when he moved to become… a presenter of the Today programme.
Unlike Robinson — who was a Young Conservative (he was president of Oxford University Conservative Association then chair of the National Young Conservative) and studied PPE at Oxford when Boris Johnson and David Cameron were careerning around the quads — details of Kuenssberg’s student years haven’t been picked over nearly as much.
She graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a first class degree in Modern History then spent a year in the US studying at Georgetown and interning at NBC News. Profiles of her don’t go any deeper than that.
She was a student and then she worked in local radio and TV in Scotland before joining the BBC in 2000. In 2001, she won Most Promising Newcomer at the Royal Television Society’s Regional Awards for her reporting as BBC North East and Cumbria’s Home Affairs Correspondent.
By 2010, with Kuenssberg appearing across BBC News, the Daily Politics, and BBC One bulletins as Chief Political Correspondent, Times columnist/perpetual fake-leather-jacket-scam-target David Aaronovitch coined the clumsy term “Kuenssbergovision” to describe the phenomena2. But a year later she jumped ship to ITV News to take up the newly-created role of Business Editor, spending three years there before returning to the BBC to replace Gavin Esler as Chief Correspondent and one of the presenters of Newsnight.
Just as the mooted move to Today would mimic Robinson’s trajectory after he held the Political Editor position, Kuenssberg’s period at ITV has a parallel in his career; Robinson was ITV News’ Political Editor for three years before he replaced Andrew Marr in the same role at the BBC. Leaving the corporation for a short time after a fairly meteoric rise is a clever move, proving the claim that the market outside the warm embrace of Auntie is interested in you.
This morning’s Politico London Playbook — penned by former Muttley to Guido Fawke’s proprieter and perpetually-thirsty drink driving enthusiast Paul Staines’ Dickhead Dastardly, Alex Wickham (who is also Wilfred Johnson’s godfather, according to The Spectator) — provided a good summary of the media establishment perspective on Kuenssberg. He writes:
END OF AN ERA: BBC Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg is in talks to leave her role fronting the national broadcaster’s Westminster coverage to potentially become a presenter on Radio 4’s Today program… The deal is not confirmed, though the view inside the Beeb is that [Waterson’s] scoop is on the money, setting off fevered speculation in SW1 and W1A.
Laura K has been the best in the business in her six years in the gig, brushing off the endless dreary criticism that comes with the role to consistently drive the news agenda. It says it all that Playbook has literally no idea what her own political views are after such a long time in the spotlight. Good luck
It’s common within the permanently circled wagons of the British media to hear criticisms like those levelled at Kuenssberg dismissed as “dreary” and for figures like her who can appear partial, addicted to anonymous sources, and willing to accept the government line to be proudly held up as “the best in the business”.
That Kuenssberg has not strapped on a blue rosette or left the BBC to take up a job in government comms like her former Newsnight colleague Allegra Stratton does not mean viewers/listeners have “no idea what her political views are after such a long time in the spotlight”.
In January 2017, the BBC Trust’s Editorial Standards Committee finally ruled on a report by Kuenssberg, broadcast in November 2015, which gave the incorrect impression that then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn objected to the use of firearms by police at incidents such as that month’s terrorist attack on the Bataclan and other locations in Paris.
Here’s a transcript of a portion of the package broadcast during the News at Six on November 16 2015, taken from the BBC Trust’s report:
Kuenssberg:
Earlier today I asked the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn if he were the resident here at Number 10 whether or not he would be happy for British officers to pull the trigger in the event of a Paris style attack.Corbyn:
I’m not happy with a shoot-to-kill policy in general. I think that is quite dangerous and I think can often be counter-productive. I think you have to have security that prevents people firing off weapons where you can. There are various degrees of doing things, as we know. But the idea you end up with a war on the streets is not a good thing.
The Editorial Standards Committee noted in its report that “the clip of Mr Corbyn which was used in the News at Six item was taken from a longer interview conducted earlier in the day” and included a transcript from it:
Kuenssberg:
If we saw the kinds of horror in Paris, here, if you were Prime Minister, would you order security services onto the street to stop people being killed?Corbyn:
Of course you’d bring people onto the streets to prevent and ensure there is safety within our society, much better that’s done by the police than security services, much better we have strong and effective community policing, neighbourhood policing and a cohesive society that brings people together, obviously that is essential and so that’s one of the messages I’ll be putting to the Prime Minister.Kuenssberg:
But if you were Prime Minister, would you be happy to order people — police or military — to shoot to kill on Britain’s streets?Corbyn:
Er, I would...I’m not happy with a shoot-to-kill policy in general, I think that is quite dangerous and I think can often be counter-productive. I think you have to have security that prevents people firing off weapons where you can. There are various degrees of doing things, as we know — but the idea you end up with a war on the streets is not a good thing, surely you have to try to work and prevent these things happening – that’s got to be the priority.
The committee ruled that it was “not duly accurate” — i.e. inaccurate — to present as fact Corbyn’s position on a specific question he had not been asked, relying on the response to a different question, and that Kuenssberg had compounded that error by editorialising in her report that “Theresa May’s message and the Labour leader’s couldn’t be more different.”
While the committee ruled that there had been “breaches of accuracy and, therefore, breaches of impartiality”, it argued that there was no evidence of an intention to mislead and concluded that the footage “had been compiled in good faith”. That’s a bit like a panel of foxes deciding that the hen house was attacked in good faith and what do chickens expect if they go strutting around looking so damn delicious?
Almost exactly a year after the Corbyn “shoot to kill” report was broadcast, the British Journalism Awards named Kuenssberg ‘Journalist of the Year’. She gave an interview with Press Gazette — which organises the awards — in which she declared herself willing to “die in a ditch for the impartiality of the BBC”.3
In the same interview, she brushed aside questions about criticism of her…
Politics is a tough business and I’m not going to get into that.
… and explained:
People sometimes ask me: ‘How do you do what you do?’. And I just think you work really hard and you are really nice and then people will want to tell you things.
[It helps] if you’re interested and have an open mind and you genuinely go and ask people questions wanting to know what they say rather than asking them to confirm what you already think.
It’s true that Kuenssberg is generallty considered “nice” within Westminster and by the politicians and hacks with whom she deals on a daily basis. But the “nice” factor is used as a way of bundling up genuine criticism of her reporting with the unquestionably misogynist abuse she receives as a woman in the public eye.
A Guardian profile of her from 2017, published after it was reported4 that she had been given a bodyguard by the BBC to accompany her to the Labour conference in Brighton, provides a good example of how abuse and criticism have been elided during her tenure.
It reaches back to 2014 to quote a sexist line from The Daily Telegraph’s then-diarist Tim Walker (“Is it just me, by the way, or has Laura been showing a lot more cleavage than usual since Paxo’s job came up for grabs?”) which was written before she became Political Editor and then notes:
Kuenssberg’s impartiality is constantly questioned, though she is accused of being both left-biased and pro-Tory. Supporters of Jeremy Corbyn consider her to have treated him unfairly. In January, the BBC Trust ruled that she had inaccurately reported his views on “shoot to kill” in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, though it said it found no evidence of bias. “I would die in a ditch for the impartiality of the BBC,” she said in an interview last year.
This is a common argument applied to BBC News’ output in general: Both sides complain so it must be getting it right. That’s a fallacy and when it comes to Kuenssberg’s reporting in general it always seems to be the left who come out worst from the mistakes, misquoting, and miraculously speedy sharing of anonymous Tory sources.
In 2016, the Shadow Foreign Affairs Minister, Stephen Doughty, resigned live on the BBC’s Daily Politics show just before the start of Prime Minister’s questions. In a blog post, which was swiftly memory holed, BBC Politics producer Andrew Alexander revealed who had stuffed the rabbit into the hat. Under the headline Resignation! Making the news on the Daily Politics, he wrote:
Just before 9am we learned from Laura Kuenssberg, who comes on the programme every Wednesday ahead of PMQs, that she was speaking to one junior shadow minister who was considering resigning. I wonder, mused our presenter Andrew Neil, if they would consider doing it live on the show?
The question was put to Laura, who thought it was a great idea. Considering it a long shot we carried on the usual work of building the show, and continued speaking to Labour MPs who were confirming reports of a string of shadow ministers considering their positions.
Within the hour we heard that Laura had sealed the deal: the shadow foreign minister Stephen Doughty would resign live in the studio.
Although he himself would probably acknowledge he isn’t a household name, we knew his resignation just before PMQs would be a dramatic moment with big political impact.”
That’s GB News big shot turned future reinstated BBC political interviewer and longstanding Spectator chairman, Andrew Neil, fishing for a stunt resignation and Laura Kuenssberg “[sealing] the deal”.
The BBC News Press Team, which has, on occasion, seemed like Kuenssberg’s personal rapid rebuttal unit, quickly issued a statement which read:
The shadow cabinet reshuffle was a major story this week and many MPs from all camps had strong opinions which were fairly reflected across BBC output. Stephen Doughty had already decided to resign and willingly chose to make his announcement on the programme.
Translation: The lemming was already on the ledge and we just pushed him at the right moment. What’s wrong with that?
This trend for BBC News to piss on viewers’ legs and assure them it’s raining has been common throughout Kuenssberg’s era as Political Editor.
After she said in a report on 11 December 2019 that “[postal votes] were looking pretty grim for Labour in a lot of the parts of the country”, despite the viewing of postal votes prior to polling day being in breach of Electoral Commission guidelines and predicting electoral outcomes based on votes cast prior to polls closing being a potential criminal offence, the BBC News Press Office again dismissed criticism. However, the edition of Politics Live, which the corporation was so certain did not “[breach] electoral law” was swiftly removed from iPlayer.
The tendency to parrot lines from anonymous sources to maintain access and influence is, of course, not confined to Kuenssberg or the BBC. Robert Peston, the pink suited, roman-a-clef writing political editor of ITV News is equally as addicted to the practice. During the 2019 general election campaign, Peston and Kuenssberg — either a bad ITV4 detective series or a ludicrously expensive cheese shop — both repeated a false claim about a Labour activist striking a Tory political advisor.
Peston said he had been told about the ‘incident’ by “senior Tories”. Kuenssberg said she had been told the false story by two sources. Both rushed to excitedly tweet the ‘revelation’ before a video emerged showing that no punch had occurred — the aide could clearly be seen accidentally walking into the protestor’s outstretched arm and neither party reacted with anger.
While Peston told ITV News at Ten viewers that “despite what many of us were told by the Tories, it was plainly an accident,” Kuenssberg simply deleted her original tweet, posted an apology, and did not refer to the incident at all during her report on the BBC News at Ten.
It was not surprising when Dominic Cummings told a joint session by two parliamentary committees that Kuenssberg had been his most common conduit for anonymous briefing while he worked in Downing Street. It had long been thought that her “senior Downing Street source” was Cummings, not least when she steamed into the replies under Pippa Crerar’s tweet about her Barnard Castle scoop — which revealed Cummings had broken lockdown rules he’d helped draft — to say:
Source says his trip was within guidelines as Cummings went to stay with his parents so they could help with childcare while he and his wife were ill — they insist no breach of lockdown.
The very same line with very similar phrasing was pushed by Cummings when he made his catastrophically ill-judge appearance in the Downing Street rose garden; an appearance where Laura Kuenssberg was among the journalists questioning him.
I’ve only raised a few examples of questionable behaviour and judgement from Kuenssberg during her time as BBC Political Editor in this newsletter. There are plenty of others — including the notorious “this is him here” moment — with many of them related to the desire to tweet first and think later, transferring the words of a ‘source’, whether it’s Dominic Cummings wearing a funny moustache or not, straight from WhatsApp into the ever-hungry maw of Twitter.
I’m not arguing that Kuenssberg is an outlier or uniquely to blame for the culture of British political journalism. The foundations of their “trade” as hacks insist on calling it have been rotted away by the need for access and the insistent hum of social media. In a machine obsessed with gossip and signifiers over substance, it’s hard to imagine any BBC Political Editor doing otherwise.
The current “runners and riders” — another excreable journalist’s phrase — to replace Kuenssberg if she does go soon are a familiar cast of big BBC names, faces from rival broadcasters, and wildcard choices from newspapers and political magazines. They all exist within the same system, driven by the same drive for access and belief that "scoops” trump hard questions. The end of the Kuenssberg era will not mean the end of the problems that have defined it.
His partner Jess Brammar was recently appointed Executive Editor of the BBC News and BBC World channels but I’m pretty certain the tip won’t have come from her.
Yet she was far from a household name at the point she became Political Editor. Politics.co.uk even felt the need to publish a piece entitled,
“Laura Kuenssberg — who is she?”
Three years later — during the final stages of the EU withdrawal deal battle in Westminster — Boris Johnson similarly declared he “would rather be dead in a ditch than agree a Brexit delay”. The delay was agreed. Boris Johnson remains living and resolutely unditched.
The BBC understandably doesn’t comment on security arrangements and never confirmed the reports which began with a story in The Sun.