Read Adam Bienkov and Patrick Howse's full and exclusive investigation into the BBC in the April edition of Byline Times. Available as a digital edition online now, or in stores and newsagents from 20 March.

Read Adam Bienkov and Patrick Howse's full and exclusive investigation into the BBC in the April edition of Byline Times. Available as a digital edition online now, or in stores and newsagents from 20 March.

The BBC operated within a “culture of fear” in which senior journalists became afraid of reporting negative stories about the Government due to external pressure from Downing Street and internal pressure from senior editors and executives, Byline Times can reveal.

The culture, which was overseen by editors perceived as having overly “cosy” relationships with Government, followed a two decade campaign to undermine and neuter Britain’s national broadcaster.

The full story is available to read in the new retail edition of Byline Times, available in shops from next Wednesday. It reveals how:

⬛ Insiders say BBC bosses became “terrified” of upsetting Downing Street during Boris Johnson’s tenure

⬛Reporters were actively discouraged from reporting embarrassing stories about Government ministers 

⬛ The former Head of BBC Westminster, Katy Searle, was seen internally as being “too close” to Downing Street.

⬛ There was widespread disquiet about the “access culture” fostered at BBC Westminster, in which maintaining good relations with Downing Street was prioritised 

⬛ Internal pressure for “balance” in news coverage was heavily slanted in the Conservatives’ favour, with Labour judged to “not be in the game” under Jeremy Corbyn

⬛ The former Labour leader was “misled” into taking part in an election campaign interview with the BBC’s Andrew Neil, when no similar agreement had been made with Downing Street

⬛ Former BBC Daily Politics Editor Robbie Gibb, who went on to work as Director of Communications for Theresa May, would “relentlessly drive the Brexit agenda“ internally at the corporation

⬛ The Covid crisis was seen by BBC bosses as a chance for the corporation to "prove its worth" to Downing Street

⬛ As a result, some reporters feared the corporation had allowed itself to become a "state broadcaster" during the pandemic

The full story includes testimony from current and former senior BBC journalists and editors.

It reveals how Government threats to scrap the license fee were successfully used by Johnson's Government to encourage more favourable coverage from the broadcaster, with BBC bosses beginning to internalise Government criticisms of the corporation

You can read the full revelations in the new retail edition of Byline Times, available to read in shops from next Wednesday, or online by subscription.

In his lucrative column for the Daily Mail, Boris Johnson backed the return of Donald Trump to the White House, primarily because he expects the former US President to be the man to stand up to Vladimir Putin by enabling a Ukrainian victory in the war Russia has been waging against it. “My thoughts, of course, go first to Ukraine,” Johnson wrote.

The former Prime Minister observed that it was under the Trump Administration that Ukraine received Javelin anti-tank weapons that proved to be invaluable in fending off the Russian attack on Ukraine’s capital city, Kyiv. This is partially true. Ukraine did get those weapons but not because of Trump, who actually attempted to withhold this congressionally-mandated military assistance package.

Ukraine had already been fighting against the Russian invasion of its eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk since 2014, by the time President Trump attempted to coerce Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into doing him political favours before sending the weapons. That resulted in Trump's first impeachment.

But it was not the first time Trump wanted to hobble military support to help Ukraine thwart President Putin’s violent aims. In July 2016, when Trump was formally designated the Republican Party’s candidate for the presidential election that year, language that had called for the United States to provide “lethal weapons” to Ukraine was deleted. The Trump campaign was being managed by Paul Manafort, who tried to use his involvement to “get whole” on a debt owed to a major Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska.

Manafort was also involved in another aspect of the Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential Election – one that culminated in an infamous meeting at New York's Trump Tower with a delegation of Russians. The meeting came about after a series of email exchanges between Donald Trump Junior and a music promoter working for the pop star son of another Russian oligarch, Aras Agalarov. The ties between the Trump and Agalarov families go back some years, with their most prominent interaction happening when Trump took his Miss Universe pageant on the road to Moscow.

When the representative from the Agalarov family reached out to Donald Trump Jr on 3 June 2016, the contact was very deliberately worded. The email explicitly stated that what was being offered was “very high level and sensitive... part of Russia and its Government’s support for Mr Trump”. The appropriate reaction would have been to contact the FBI, but Trump Junior replied: “I love it!”

On 7 June 2016, another email stated that there was a “Russian Government attorney who is flying over from Moscow” for the subsequent meeting attended by Manafort alongside Trump Junior and Jared Kushner.

While in office, Trump flew to Helsinki for a summit with Putin. The two men sat behind closed doors for a period of time, after which Trump ordered the translator to destroy her notes. The press conference did not go well. A leading Russian expert in Trump’s administration, Fiona Hill, described it as “mortifying”, with Trump publicly taking Putin’s words over those of his own security agencies.

These examples are evidence enough that Donald Trump has not stood up to Vladimir Putin. That he will not stand up to Putin if he returns to the White House. It is not unlikely that the Russian President has kompromat on Trump, which means the businessman cannot stand up to Putin.

Though Trump claims that the multiple court cases he faces are a political witch-hunt, they are nothing of the sort. One current legal proceeding against him is determining the degree of damages to be awarded for defamation and sexual assault. In another case, Trump and his children are accused of a series of financial crimes spanning decades.

Then there are the multiple cases that are linked to the events of the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. The most significant legal battle here is whether having incited insurrection, Trump is banned from holding office again in line with the Constitution.

So why did Boris Johnson feel the need to endorse Trump on the basis of Ukraine?

Both men share one characteristic: they are both liars. Perhaps Johnson's endorsement is, as usual, in his own self-serving interests. Because it is certainly not in the interests of the United States, Ukraine or the world.

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The 17th Century English Parliament lasting from 1640 until 1660 was known as the ‘Long Parliament’. We can only hope that we are not about to see anything comparable. Yet, the UK Parliament that first met on 17 December 2019, following a general election which gave Boris Johnson a thumping 80 seat majority, feels, in perception, like the longest Parliament ever.  

The next general election can be delayed until five years after that initial meeting which, allowing for a minimum of 25 working days for campaigning, means as late as 28 January 2025. That would, however, impinge on the 2024 Christmas festivities, hardly a recipe for incumbent electoral success. Therefore, realistically, we will have a 2024 election, in all probability in the autumn given the current dire standing of the Conservative Party in the polls.

But Parliaments entering a fifth year, as in 1992-97 or 2005-10, rarely sustain their utility. The 2010-15 Parliament proved an exception because odium could be deflected onto the Liberal Democrats as Conservative coalition partners. It was also an ephemeral era of fixed term parliaments agreed as part of that Coalition deal.

Nonetheless, the 2019-24 Parliament is in a class of its own. It has become embarrassingly light on significant Government legislative business after all the turmoil of 2022. The Roman Empire had its years of multiple Emperors. Recent UK political history has come close to matching it, Number 10 Downing Street consecutively occupied by Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. Then 2023 became almost one for rejoicing, with Sunak able to survive as Prime Minister until the very end. 

Taking the current Parliament as an entity, what stands out are not just the momentous events with which it grappled, but how poorly they were handled. This applies to a self-inflicted debacle, two external shocks, and a globally shared existential imperative: Brexit, Covid, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and environmental apocalypse moving ever closer.

COVID Cronyism and Mone – The Tip of the Iceberg: Byline Times’ Full Story of the PPE Cash Carousel

Byline Times has been unravelling the dealings behind the procurement of personal protective equipment (PPE) in the UK since the very early days of the pandemic. Here’s what we learnt – and what we still need answers to…

Josiah Mortimer
Trade, Economy and Public Health

Johnson released a triumphant fist pump on confirmation of his 2019 electoral success, convinced that thereafter he could do much as he liked. He had promised to ‘get Brexit done’ through an ‘oven-ready’ deal. Negotiations produced something much more problematic than that implied, including a de facto trading barrier down the Irish Sea to prevent a hard border on the Irish mainland from undermining the Good Friday Agreement. Even Sunak’s mitigating 2023 Windsor Framework failed to entice the DUP into restoring power sharing institutions in Northern Ireland, albeit a party needing few pretexts for politically sulking, with its majority hold on the province’s electorate looking increasingly tenuous.

Concern mounted about the wider impact on the UK’s trading position from the greater friction inevitably introduced with prime European markets. New agreements negotiated wider afield only compensated for a fraction of the damage caused. The scheduled 2026 review of the 2021 EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement will therefore require more than token fine-tuning if the disruptive effect of Johnson’s cavalier Brexit are to be further alleviated.

No sooner had the UK withdrawn from the EU in early 2020 than a pandemic was looming over the horizon. The delayed response in March 2020 was repeated during a second infection wave in the autumn, leading to tens of thousands of avoidable deaths. Sunak, as Chancellor, had been instrumental in resisting further lockdowns, enlisting the aid of barely credible dissenting scientific voices, falsely positing a clash between the economy and public health when, in fact, they were interdependent. The ongoing Covid Inquiry has revealed in graphic detail, too, evidence of a toxic and dysfunctional working environment rampant in Johnson’s Number 10.

When it was divulged that public health regulations had been ignored in Downing Street, in what became infamously known as Partygate, it contributed – along with other scandals – to the premature demise of Johnson’s Premiership in September 2022, precipitating a slump in the Conservative Party’s poll ratings from which it is yet to recover.

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‘The Dark Heart of Trussonomics: The Mainstreaming of Libertarian Theories of Social Darwinism and Apartheid’

The legacy of the Nazi ideology of eugenics – popularised by Charles Murray’s controversial book ‘The Bell Curve’ – goes some way to explaining Trussonomics, writes Nafeez Ahmed

Nafeez Ahmed
Cost of Living and Climate Breakdown

As Chancellor, Sunak had put together a substantial package of employee and business support to cushion the impact of the pandemic; one marred however by high levels of fraud, and with unlawful preferential routes used for granting public procurement contracts. As a lockdown-sceptic, he became more resistant towards the compelling arguments for extending this support until normal life resumed, despite being eventually obliged to accept that case. Similar hesitancy revealed itself in grudging willingness to approve state subsidies for consumers and the imposition of windfall taxes on fossil fuel producers to counteract a surge in energy prices consequent upon Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

With food prices also soaring, inflation peaked at over 11% in October 2022, higher than for four decades. Now subsiding, the rate has nonetheless remained above the official Bank of England target, an accompanying hike in interest levels piling further agony on mortgagees and renters, fuelling a serious cost of living crisis for millions of families. Supply chains are, moreover, at further risk from current developments in the Middle East. Liz Truss’s flirtation with trickle-down economics, during the briefest of stays as Prime Minister in autumn 2022, had merely served to exacerbate this financial instability.

Once Sunak seized the Premiership, any credit for international leadership on climate crisis was also gratuitously forfeited. Boris Johnson had at least paid lip service to this agenda though, as was often the case, his rhetoric far exceeded any concrete progress. Sunak, however, displayed extraordinary complacency, sanctioning new oil and gas licences in defiance of pleading from climate scientists to do precisely the opposite.           

Sunak on Net Zero: Desperate, Cynical and Doomed to Fail

The climate was the one last issue on which Britain could credibly claim a degree of global leadership – the Conservatives’ cheap electioneering has shattered that

Jonathan Lis
A Grim Scorecard        

There have been momentous challenges during the 2019-24 Parliament. We could equally have looked at crippling backlogs in the health and court services; severe capacity constraints in prisons; crises in social care and affordable housing; an increasing attainment gap in education; near bankruptcy of many local councils; constant disruption to public transport; or growing levels of relative and absolute poverty. All these maladies are a debilitating combination of economic stagnation, a high tax burden and deteriorating public services. In this context, the more emphasis is placed on future tax cuts, the greater will be an austerian squeeze on public services.

The bottom line is that average wages are projected to remain below their 2008 level, with reputable forecasters predicting that the current Parliament will be the first for several decades to oversee a decline in household living standards. Cultural issues of social identity have, moreover, been used to divert political attention from structural economic disadvantage with Sunak, a man of manifold riches, obscenely laying the blame on the most marginalised demographic groups for the country’s social ills.

The first of three Prime Ministers was an opportunistic maverick driven from office in disgrace; then came an ideological fanatic, forced out by financial chaos; followed by an occupant of Downing Street who will only countenance a proactive state as a very last resort. Indeed, on close inspection Sunak is, in many respects, just as culpable as Johnson for much that has gone wrong. All this has taken place in a Parliament moving inexorably towards a brutal electoral verdict on a period of painfully poor governance.

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There’s a scene in the crime film The Usual Suspects in which the investigating agent suggests that you can always tell if a captured man is guilty by how well they sleep in their cell.

“Let's say you arrest three guys for the same killing”, Special Agent Kujan tells his colleagues.

“You put them all in jail overnight. The next morning, whoever's sleeping is your man.” 

I recalled this observation while watching the former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s two day interrogation by the Covid Inquiry.

When we last saw Johnson earlier this year he was fighting for his political life, lashing out at critics and threatening to take down the Conservative party with him.

Back then the man described by his predecessor David Cameron as a “greased piglet” appeared to not only have trotters, but fangs too.

Yet after losing that fight something appeared to change in the former PM's demeanour. Visibly older and paler, Johnson initially exhibited to the Inquiry little of the political fight he had previously shown. 

Like a guilty man finally able to catch a decent night’s sleep after years of running from the law, Johnson seemed content for the Inquiry to do what they wanted with him.

Opening with a broad, but vague apology for undefined “mistakes” made by his Government, Johnson admitted that not everything had gone well during the pandemic. 

Yet when he was pushed by the Inquiry’s lead interrogator Hugo Keith about what exactly those mistakes might be, Johnson immediately sought to deflect the blame onto others.

“Sometimes… the BBC News would have one message from Number 10, then a slightly different one from Scotland or wherever, and I think we need to sort that out in future” he said.

When Keith indicated his dissatisfaction at this obvious attempt to deflect responsibility away from himself, Johnson again prevaricated.

“Were there things that we should have done differently? Unquestionably. But, you know, I would struggle to itemise them all before you now”, he replied.

Such reluctance to identify his own mistakes continued throughout the two days.

When asked about his refusal to take Covid seriously in the opening months of the outbreak, Johnson repeatedly sought to blame it on his own advisers. 

Despite his then Health Secretary chairing five separate emergency COBRA meetings about it, none of which he even bothered to attend, Johnson insisted that somehow “it wasn't really escalated to me as an issue of national concern”.

When evidence was put to him of his own Chief Adviser Domimic Cummings in early February warning him that the Government’s scientific advisers had found that the virus was “out of control” and would soon “sweep the world”, Johnson again sought to spread the blame, saying that “our” mistake was that “we” did not take these warnings seriously enough.

Later when asked to take responsibility for his failure to impose Covid restrictions until weeks after they were recommended to him, he again bounced it onto others, saying that “the Cabinet was, on the whole, more reluctant to impose [restrictions] than necessarily I was".

Boris Johnson’s Covid Catastrophe Has Exposed the Tragic Deference and Negligence of British Politics

Damning evidence from the Covid Inquiry reveals how the former PM was enabled by a system determined to look the other way, reports Adam Bienkov

Adam Bienkov
Deflecting Blame

Indeed on almost every issue, from Partygate, to the “toxic” culture inside Number 10, and the Eat Out to Help scheme, Johnson point blank refused to take full blame for his own actions.

Such deflection was not always possible, however.

When cornered by Keith on the specific question of whether his own decisions had cost lives, Johnson appeared unsure of what to say, before eventually replying that "I can't give you the answer to that question… I don’t know”.

At times, these attempts to disassociate himself from his own actions took on an almost otherworldly quality. Shown a report, that he was first handed back in March 2020, suggesting that his then plans to deal with the virus would lead to the NHS being massively overwhelmed, Johnson slipped into an almost out-of-body state.

“I do remember looking at it and thinking there was something amiss,” he told Keith, while failing to explain why he had not actually done anything about this realisation.

When such attempts to plead ignorance didn’t work, Johnson instead resorted to outright denial. 

At one point Johnson insisted that by the time of the first lockdown he was fully in "Virus Beating Mode". This insistence continued despite being shown evidence of him telling his colleagues that they were "killing the patient to tackle the tumour" and "destroying everything for people who will die anyway soon".

Later, when asked about the extensive evidence of his other comments to colleagues suggesting that Covid was “nature’s way of dealing with old people” and that they should let it “rip” through the population, Johnson again insisted this was the opposite of his views. 

Refusing to let this pass, Keith immediately went to list every example of him saying the very words he had just denied, to Johnson's obvious discomfort.

Nor was the former PM's apparent dishonesty restricted to the past. At one point Keith asked Johnson about his written statement to the Inquiry claiming that the Government had “properly discussed” the Eat Out to Help scheme in advance with the Chief Scientific Officer Patrick Vallance and Chief Medical Adviser Chris Whitty.

Pushed on why he had made this statement, given both men denied any such discussion taking place, Johnson replied that this was merely an “assumption” he had made, adding that he struggled to see how such an important policy would have been “smuggled” past the two men.

His attempts to explain how thousands of WhatsApp messages stored on his phone had somehow been "automatically" deleted prior to the start of the Inquiry were similarly unconvincing.

The Media, Johnson and Covid: ‘An Orgy of Narcissism’ that Killed Thousands

As the Covid Inquiry has revealed, Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings are morbid symptoms of a sick system. At the heart of that sickness is the media

Peter Jukes
Getting Away With It

The Inquiry’s interrogation of Johnson, while at times subtle, was also brilliant in exposing his fundamental dishonesty and lack of seriousness.

Over the course of two long days, Keith and his fellow interrogators patiently set out the evidence of a Prime Minister who was deeply out of his depth and unsuited to the task of leading the nation.

Little genuinely new was revealed, due to the fact that most of the evidence had already been put to previous witnesses. Nor was this a Paxman-like interrogation in which the Inquiry sought to nail the former Prime Minister to the wall for his misdeeds.

Yet the cumulative impact of the Inquiry's questioning of Johnson was in some ways all the more damning for its calmness.

The former PM was quietly asked to take responsibility for a series of decisions which collectively resulted in the unnecessary deaths of many thousands of people. By the end, his refusal to take such responsibility, and his dishonest attempts to deflect it onto others, was so obvious that there remains little for the Inquiry to now do other than to simply set that out.

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Yet while the Inquiry is already exposing Johnson for the deeply flawed individual he is, what it cannot do is fully expose how such a man was ever allowed to be in such a position of power in the first place.

Throughout his political career, supporters and commentators have attributed an almost supernatural ability onto Johnson for getting away with things.

Yet what this Inquiry has helped to demonstrate is that this supposed ability originated not in the man himself, but in their own indulgence of him.

While a "greased piglet" may be able to evade our grasp, somebody else has to be willing to apply the grease to him in the first place.

Such greasing was evident throughout this Inquiry. Throughout these sessions, evidence has repeatedly been shown of his colleague's private despair at his lack of seriousness, incompetence and dishonesty. Questioned by the Inquiry, some of these same witnesses queued up to list those same faults on the record.

Yet at no point has any of them explained why they continued to serve him despite those faults. Nor have any of his many previous media supporters bothered to explain why they were content to ignore these flaws for so long.

For decades this negligent enablement of Johnson allowed him to rise from the ranks of a disgraced junior reporter to the most powerful politician in the country, without almost anyone stopping to question whether such a rise was either justified, or wise.

For most of that time the consequences were limited. While embarrassing to those directly involved, his fabrication of quotes as a journalist, or dishonesty about his extramarital affairs while a Shadow Minister, had little impact on the wider world.

That all changed once he became Prime Minister and was charged with leading the country through Brexit and then Covid. Over the course of two major crises Johnson's deep flaws were fully exposed to the whole world with momentous and tragic consequences.

While the Covid Inquiry can put the evidence of those flaws firmly on the record, it cannot fully explain why those around him allowed him to get away with them for so long.

The search for that more shameful truth will have to take place elsewhere.