Sun Top Gear Desperation

After two days of handing out front page kickings to the hated BBC over a stunt for the new series of Top Gear - and thus ensuring a bigger audience than their columnist Jeremy Clarkson managed to deliver before his downfall last year - the Sun and its increasingly embattled editor Tony Gallagher had got no further than an assurance from host Chris Evans that a few seconds’ film footage would not be aired.

Tony Gallagher ... under pressure

Gallagher should have realised that the story had run its course and moved on. But his obsession with putting one over on the Beeb, together with desperation to prove to News UK’s twinkle toed yet domestically combative CEO Rebekah Brooks that he is not a total waste of editorial space, have got the better of him. “I predict another busy day for the BBC press office tomorrow. #TopGear” he told his Twitter followers yesterday.

And so it came to pass that Sun readers have woken to the shrieking headline (but not, tellingly, on the front page) “BBC chief left clinging to her £187,000-a-year job after Top Gear Cenotaph scandal continues to worsen … EXCLUSIVE: Defence officials condemn skit and claim filming at barracks would have been banned if they’d known about it in advance”. There’s a Clause 1: Accuracy moment coming.

That’s because the sum total of defence officials quoted in the body of the Sun’s report is zero. Yes, zero. Zilch. None. Nil. Nada. Not a sausage. Bugger all. So the opening line of the article, “POLITICIANS and military top brass last night accused Top Gear’s BBC boss of “extremely poor judgment” over the show’s Cenotaph skit”, is also crap.

Or maybe not, eh Tone?

The Sun’s talking heads included “Colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan” (he’s retired, so does not qualify as “military top brass”), “General Sir Mike Jackson, former head of the British Army” (ditto), and “General Sir Richard Dannatt, another former head of the Army” (ditto). Also, it’s politician singular, and even then it’s only Tory rent-a-quote MP Andrew Bridgen.

Isn’t there one useful source to back up this drivel? Sadly, all the Sun can muster is “Last night a defence insider revealed”. So that’s a no, then. In a lame last throw of the dice, the paper bleats about the car involved in the stunt carrying advertising logos. Yeah, like every car in every motor racing broadcast on the BBC for decades. This is just desperate.

That desperation is merely compounded by a Sun Says rant which tells “ONLY in the metropolitan liberal bubble BBC executives inhabit can anyone have thought it right to have an American TV star wheelspin a hot-rod round the Cenotaph”. The American TV star was not driving, and nothing was done “round the Cenotaph”. It gets worse: “It is time the BBC stopped being so shifty”. It’s time the Sun stopped lying about the BBC, you mean.

We even get “And as yet another scandal rocks the corporation”, but there is no scandal. As Private Eye magazine has revealed this week, Tony Gallagher’s editorship of the Sun is in trouble. There have been a series of disastrous and untrue front page splashes - the Jeremy Corbyn “Short Money” claim, the “Refugee crossing Europe without a passport” hokum, and last week’s “Queen Backs Brexit” rubbish for three.

It’s time Tony Gallagher stopped being so shifty and owned up to the scandal of his time in the editor’s chair. Then Ms Brooks can set about finding a competent replacement.