The BBC’s Andrew Marr caused controversy – and considerable outrage – on Sunday morning when he aggressively jabbed his notes toward her face and angrily told her he was as democratic as she is.
Class thinktank director and Labour prospective parliamentary candidate Faiza Shaheen concluded Marr’s behaviour was because “the number of women and people of colour coming forward and challenging the establishment is growing and the establishment is not taking it at all well“.
But the BBC denied there was any issue or even any behaviour out of the ordinary, telling the SKWAWKBOX:
Andrew used his interview with Baroness Chakrabarti to robustly challenge her views about the proposed Brexit deal and used the same approach as he would when interviewing any other politician.
But regular Marr watchers would question this, as the BBC man has a reputation for going soft on Tories – earlier this year, for example, he was captured on screen giving front-bencher Penny Mordaunt a thumbs-up and telling her how well she’d done.
So the SKWAWKBOX made a video comparison.
To ensure the comparison gave Marr the benefit of any doubt, the SKWAWKBOX chose an extreme case – an Marr interview with Prime Minister Theresa May, who would be expected to receive the toughest of grillings – and the most damning of topics: May’s despicable ‘hostile environment’ policy.
This was set next to Marr’s interview with Shami Chakrabarti.
The results were startling:
May – even as PM and on such a clear-cut, damning subject as the hostile environment that has blighted the lives of Windrush citizens and others – was allowed long, uninterrupted silence to complete her answers.
Chakrabarti, by contrast, was often given as little as one or two seconds to start a response before Marr interrupted. There were a very few longer periods not shown in the video for brevity, but the Chakrabarti interview was peppered with periods of single-figure of seconds before interruptions.
And that was before the angry exchange about being democratic or patronising.
SKWAWKBOX comment:
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