So Farewell Then Laura Kuenssberg

Having just weathered another right-wing onslaught, over the appointment of Jess Brammar, who was considered insufficiently reliable by those who are fully invested in the adoration of alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, the BBC is about to go through the whole shebang once more, only with a higher profile appointment.

Laura Kuenssberg ((c) Guardian)

That is because, as Jim Waterson at the Guardian told early yesterday evening, the Corporation’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg is shortly to leave her post, most likely remaining with the Beeb in some sort of presenting role. But while her contemporaries within the media class line up to heap praise on her five year tenure, here on Zelo Street there is a more sceptical, not to say critical, view of her time at the top.

There is also the thought that Waterson, who knows well the mindset of the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog, timed the publication of his scoop - it appeared at 1818 hours - to embarrass The Great Guido by waiting until the office-hours weekday bloggers had clocked off for the day. That may not be unrelated to the incessant and plain nasty Fawkes attacks on his partner - Ms Brammar.

Meanwhile, we should be prepared for yet another stark illustration of the ever-widening chasm between what the media class thinks of itself, and what those outside the bubble see all too clearly. In Ms Kuenssberg’s case, the effusive praise will skip neatly over “The BBC's political editor Laura Kuenssberg inaccurately represented Jeremy Corbyn's views on shoot-to-kill policies in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, the BBC Trust has ruled”.

Also skipped over will no doubt be the on-air resignation of a junior shadow minister, timed to cause maximum damage Jezza, which caught the Beeb “making the news” rather than just reporting it. Plus the allegations of bias during reporting the 2016 round of local elections, suggesting Labour was losing ground when it was making gains.

Worse was her reporting from a Leeds hospital during the 2019 General Election campaign, after revelations that a four-year-old boy had been forced to sleep on a pile of coats. “So Matt Hancock was despatched to Leeds General [Infirmary], to try to sort out mess, hearing Labour activists scrambled to go + protest, and it turned nasty when they arrived - one of them punched Hancock's adviser”. She was wrong.

The problem is that, as she must have known, the herd instinct kicked in and others took her report as fact. But there was no punch. Robert Peston of ITV said sorry. Ms Kuenssberg appeared not to. Then came this gem, just before polling: “The postal votes have already arrived, the parties are not meant to look at it but they do kind of get a hint, and on both sides people are telling me that postal votes that are in are looking pretty grim for Labour in a lot of parts of the country”. She’s not meant to report it, either.

So while there will now be endless speculation as to who will replace her, with no end of ridiculous right-wing suggestions for a successor - you can bet with some certainty that the odious flannelled fool Master Harry Cole, now pretending to be political editor of the Murdoch Sun, and who wouldn’t be able to identify journalism if it bit him on his arse, will be one of them - that chasm between media class and public will grow ever wider.

Meanwhile, the public remain badly served by their national broadcaster. Just a thought.

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