Sunday, March 12, 2023
A further failure of impartiality
A far more serious breach of the BBC's impartiality guidelines than anything Gary Lineker may have tweeted in my view, was the comments by Fiona Bruce during Thursday's Question Time. The remarks in full are quoted below:
Effectively, we have a presenter trying to minimise domestic violence, and one as well, who is also an ambassador for the charity Refuge, who work with victims of domestic abuse. The reaction of BBC management was that Bruce was trying to provide context. Presumably they think 'I only hit her once for context' is a valid defence to a domestic abuse charge.
Just to actually provide some real context, there is an excellent article in the Observer by Catherine Bennett, who writes that Stanley Johnson's ex-wife, the late artist Charlotte Wahl, kept his abuse secret until four years ago when she told Boris’s biographer, Tom Bower, that their marriage had been “ghastly, terrible”:
“I want the truth told,” she said about Stanley’s violence, which was witnessed by Boris. “He hit me many times, over many years.” Early on he resented her seeing her friends “and that’s when he first hit me”. Later, she was deposited in the country, without a car. “To adultery and violence, his family could add deserter.”
Although the full extent of her domestic torment was not made clear in extracts published by the Daily Mail in 2020, it became national news that “Boris’s dad broke his mum’s nose”. After a breakdown, Wahl had been admitted to the Maudsley hospital where doctors, she said, “spoke to Stanley about his abuse of me”. Her parents confronted Stanley, “but he denied it”.
More allegations are available in Bower’s biography of Boris, The Gambler. Stanley’s denials have been reported, but remain hard to source.
Should Rishi Sunak allow his knighthood, there could hardly be a clearer sign that the Tory approach to domestic abuse will be resuming, after a temporary show of interest, the default complacency that allowed Theresa May to award the same honour to Geoffrey Boycott. He’d been convicted in 1998 for repeatedly punching a girlfriend. Sir Geoffrey’s response, when asked about this: “I couldn’t give a toss.”
The king, too, if he intends to indulge Johnsonian overreach, might want to consider the academic contention that public attitudes towards IPVAW shape, as one study puts it, “the social environment in which such violence takes place, and attitudes of acceptability to IPVAW are considered a risk factor to actual IPVAW”. It follows that policymakers and public figures who are serious about protecting women will not want honours conferred on men who hit them.
A knighthood for Stanley can raise awareness only of what remains evident from abject conviction rates, from sickening police attitudes again exposed in the case of David Carrick and, indeed, from much of the media’s lingering regard for post-disgrace Stanley: domestic abuse remains one lethal epidemic society can live with. After Wahl finally disclosed what Bower calls “the family’s great secret”, broadcasters’ appetite for her persecutor’s fatuous condescension continued as inexplicably keen as it was before he was exposed. Given an honour, he might even be able to increase his fees.
That Stanley has seen no necessity for perceptible regret or a hint of shame, can – if Sunak agrees to his elevation – only remind abuse victims that their assaults at home by the men in (or once in) their lives are still considered less, not more serious, than assaults by strangers. Had Stanley been revealed by Bower to have once broken a random woman’s nose in the street, or repeatedly hit female strangers in public, even his son might have anticipated an absolute refusal to honour such a man. Since the victim of these acts of violence was Boris’s mother, assaulted at home by someone he would call “a loved one”, he could reasonably expect what happened last week: a recoil from, above all, his latest venture in cronyism.
Tom Bower's biography of Boris Johnson makes it clear that the hitting was not a one-off, but repeated. And yet there are no Tory MPs or cabinet ministers clambering for action to be taken against Fiona Bruce for the imbalance she demonstrated on Question Time.
Just to actually provide some real context, there is an excellent article in the Observer by Catherine Bennett, who writes that Stanley Johnson's ex-wife, the late artist Charlotte Wahl, kept his abuse secret until four years ago when she told Boris’s biographer, Tom Bower, that their marriage had been “ghastly, terrible”:
“I want the truth told,” she said about Stanley’s violence, which was witnessed by Boris. “He hit me many times, over many years.” Early on he resented her seeing her friends “and that’s when he first hit me”. Later, she was deposited in the country, without a car. “To adultery and violence, his family could add deserter.”
Although the full extent of her domestic torment was not made clear in extracts published by the Daily Mail in 2020, it became national news that “Boris’s dad broke his mum’s nose”. After a breakdown, Wahl had been admitted to the Maudsley hospital where doctors, she said, “spoke to Stanley about his abuse of me”. Her parents confronted Stanley, “but he denied it”.
More allegations are available in Bower’s biography of Boris, The Gambler. Stanley’s denials have been reported, but remain hard to source.
Should Rishi Sunak allow his knighthood, there could hardly be a clearer sign that the Tory approach to domestic abuse will be resuming, after a temporary show of interest, the default complacency that allowed Theresa May to award the same honour to Geoffrey Boycott. He’d been convicted in 1998 for repeatedly punching a girlfriend. Sir Geoffrey’s response, when asked about this: “I couldn’t give a toss.”
The king, too, if he intends to indulge Johnsonian overreach, might want to consider the academic contention that public attitudes towards IPVAW shape, as one study puts it, “the social environment in which such violence takes place, and attitudes of acceptability to IPVAW are considered a risk factor to actual IPVAW”. It follows that policymakers and public figures who are serious about protecting women will not want honours conferred on men who hit them.
A knighthood for Stanley can raise awareness only of what remains evident from abject conviction rates, from sickening police attitudes again exposed in the case of David Carrick and, indeed, from much of the media’s lingering regard for post-disgrace Stanley: domestic abuse remains one lethal epidemic society can live with. After Wahl finally disclosed what Bower calls “the family’s great secret”, broadcasters’ appetite for her persecutor’s fatuous condescension continued as inexplicably keen as it was before he was exposed. Given an honour, he might even be able to increase his fees.
That Stanley has seen no necessity for perceptible regret or a hint of shame, can – if Sunak agrees to his elevation – only remind abuse victims that their assaults at home by the men in (or once in) their lives are still considered less, not more serious, than assaults by strangers. Had Stanley been revealed by Bower to have once broken a random woman’s nose in the street, or repeatedly hit female strangers in public, even his son might have anticipated an absolute refusal to honour such a man. Since the victim of these acts of violence was Boris’s mother, assaulted at home by someone he would call “a loved one”, he could reasonably expect what happened last week: a recoil from, above all, his latest venture in cronyism.
Tom Bower's biography of Boris Johnson makes it clear that the hitting was not a one-off, but repeated. And yet there are no Tory MPs or cabinet ministers clambering for action to be taken against Fiona Bruce for the imbalance she demonstrated on Question Time.
Is that a sign of the times, an indication of the extent that Lineker put the Tories on the defensive with one tweet, or both?
