Main Anchor, Channel 4 News. Unreported World. Ways to Change the World, Strictly Class of 2023, Trustee RBG Kew. Chairman Duchenne UK krishnan
@channel4
.com
After a robust interview with Steve Baker MP I used a very offensive word in an unguarded moment off air. While it was not broadcast that word in any context is beneath the standards I set myself and I apologise unreservedly. I have reached out to Steve Baker to say sorry
I have a 13 year old doing end of year exams at home this week. When I look at how his history curriculum basically hasn’t changed since I was at school in the 80’s it’s no wonder this country is so clueless about its past.
It seems to me the significant thing that happened tonight was that government placed responsibility for the infection rate on the public taking sensible decisions. So if infections and deaths go up again it will be the public not the government that caused it.
New strain of COVID could be 70% more transmissible, Hancock hinting at months of lockdown, not clear if schools will return, British traffic cut off from Europe, No Deal days away - and MPs have broken up for Xmas, which has been cancelled. Make sense of that in a democracy.
Happy 90th Birthday Dr Krishnan Guru-Murthy! He's at work today as usual, in the NHS, where he must surely by now be the longest serving Consultant Radiologist on record. He became an NHS doctor when he arrived in the UK in 1962 and was made a consultant in the early 1970s. Here…
Dear colleagues. Please stop calling allegations about groping “private life”. It isn’t private life. Having affairs can be said to be private life. Groping is about public conduct, respect for women and is potentially criminal.
It is strange how confident some people are that alleged breaking of the ministerial code (which she denies) is a resigning matter for Nicola Sturgeon when actual unlawful action admitted by Govt in Westminster (and not even apologised for) is not.
On the day govt formally announce Channel 4 privatisation they have refused
#C4News
requests for an interview and no Tory MPs approached will do it either. We were just about to interview one and he cancelled moments before. Do they really want to ‘unleash potential’?
The truth is you only book Miriam Margolyes to be live on air if you are either hoping she says something outrageous, or are a new producer who has never seen her on anything before. 😂😂
Just a hunch but focussing on enforcement, fines and walks with coffee might distract some people from whether lockdown rules are effective and clear, impact of xmas mixing, borders and quarantine, schools chaos, hungry kids without laptops, and a failed test and trace system.
As the NHS celebrates 72 years this weekend my Dad has just gone back to work after 3 months away due to Covid19. He’s been an NHS doctor for 58 of those 72.
That’s all folks. Heartbroken. Thanks for the love and support - I’m so delighted that so many people enjoyed watching us.
@bbcstrictly
brought me more happiness than I ever imagined. It has been life changing and life affirming. There is something about taking big risks,…
I'm 50, have genetic heart condition, same as Dad who's 87. I'm "healthy" : ride London-Paris for
@DuchenneUK
trekked Namibia for
@comicrelief
. Dying now would feel early by decades. An 'underlying condition' does not mean death with Covid is only to be expected or doesn't count
once again for those not getting it : 980 is not the number who died today. Just the number they announced of those who died in hospital. The real number of extra dead in 24 hours - including those not yet announced, those in care homes, at home, etc - could be hundreds more
I don’t know about you but if there is no serious criminality, abuse of power or corruption the private lives of public figures are of no concern to me.
“You’re talking total rubbish.”
Boris Johnson denies he is breaking his promise to “level up” the north of England after it was announced the government was scrapping its plans for a high-speed rail line between the East Midlands and Leeds.
Breaking : The Duke of York will face a civil trial in America over sexual abuse claims after a US judge dismissed Prince Andrew's attempt to have the lawsuit thrown out.
There is a myth lots of people want to believe that nobody anywhere has a clue or knows what they are doing or is handling COVID any better than the UK. It isn’t true.
80,868 lives. 80868 funerals. It’s an extraordinary number. Yet most of us still don’t know one of them. At what point do enough people die for all of us to feel it? To notice what has actually happened? Disaster is the wrong word. I don’t know what is the right one.
Isn’t it going to be quite hard for Tory MPs who’ve changed their minds about Boris Johnson and want a second vote to remove him to tell Scotland they have to live with the decision of the 2014 referendum for another generation?
When you think about what those (mostly) older white men have got away with saying on the BBC and Twitter day after day this is a quite perplexing finding.
The Downing Street BYOB Party needs to be seen in the context of the time - us being told to only meet one person outside, massive restrictions, massive deaths, the Cummings scandal about to break.
Meet Conservative MP Ben Bradley: He voted Remain then became a Brexiteer then voted against the deal then voted for the deal then said he’d struggle to back the deal again then said he would back the deal. But you should not get another vote.
For clarity as some facts are being muddled : Channel 4 is state owned but commercially funded by ads and doesn’t get public money. A sell off requires MPs to vote for it. The editorial independence and funding of news can be ring fenced in a sale if govt wants (as sky news)
And would you like some facts with your video? Homelessness and rough sleeping fell under last Labour govt, went up under the Coalition and the Conservatives. It started falling again after 2017 but went up again in London and overall since 2010 rough sleeping rose around 165%
"It's Labour that was responsible for the massive rise of homelessness."
Chancellor
@sajidjavid
claims that the previous Labour government is to blame for the UK's rise in homelessness.
Labour's pledged to end rough sleeping in the
#GE2019
campaign:
Can anyone think of a time a special adviser got to hold a press conference about themselves (rather than Govt business) in 10 Downing Street before? It appears to be official now that this is the Cummings/Johnson administration.
I’m rarely more aware of being in an ethnic minority than when reading, watching and listening to the British media cover race. I think things are better in all sorts of ways than when I started in 1988, but not by nearly enough.
Well - not for the first time Theresa May calls in the cameras and gets everyone excited only to say nothing new except she’s a bit fed up not to be getting her way. No apology. No compromise. It’s not her fault. It’s those stupid MPs.
There is now no reason why the daily briefing couldn’t have 4 or 5 socially distanced journalists a day in a briefing room asking the PM or ministers the questions face to face. Today’s questioning was a technical disaster. It was very convenient for the government.
Over 100k deaths. Boris Johnson repeats "We truly did everything we could....to minimise the loss of life and minimise suffering." No admissions of late decisions or mistakes.
Home school and working from home are not compatible. Tears, tantrums, non-stop expletives. And that’s just me. I’m actually finding myself anxious because it starts again tomorrow.
Repeatedly now, asked by politicians and journalists, the government has refused to reveal what it has been warned about the number of deaths and hospitalisations to expect after opening up fully on July 19th. You have to ask yourself why, because they won't answer.
On
#C4News
former CSA
@Sir_David_King
says unlock is wrong, that if we had this level of deaths at the start we would be locking down, that Dominic Cummings was wrong to travel, that govt handling of the pandemic has been "disastrous" with maybe 40,000 excess preventable deaths
Is it me or is political party polling over Cummings when 60,000 people are dead and more still dying everyday a bit (massively) missing the point? Why aren’t the banner newspaper headlines WHERE IS TEST, TRACE, ISOLATE?
I'm sorry to say we won't be able to hold the Metropolitan Police Commissioner to account tonight for the Casey Report's findings of institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia because his press office have again excluded
#C4News
When it comes to racism, there’s no such thing as ‘impartiality’ – an open letter to the BBC | Afua Hirsch, Lenny Henry, Adrian Lester, Krishnan Guru-Murthy and 40 others
We are also - surprisingly - now being told Rishi Sunak doesn’t have time to appear on
#C4News
tomorrow. He will have time to do GB News and Times Radio (not public service broadcasters) and multiple interviews on the BBC.
It remains really odd that the UK govt watched what happened in Scotland with exam results, knew the same thing would happen in England, but carried on anyway. Students, parents et al have been warning about precisely this happening for weeks.
I was born in Liverpool and it’s the city that welcomed my parents when they came to Britain almost 60 years ago. I’ve interviewed Klopp twice and he’s a phenomenal leader. What a pleasure to see
@LFC
in their rightful place.
I wish it didn't take the tears of Azeem Rafiq to make people think or be 'heartbroken'. There will barely be a brown-skinned person in Britain who hasn't felt that smarting, holding back the tears feeling, while being told it was just banter.
Contrast the way they cleared the area outside the White House of peaceful anti-racist protesters so Trump could wave a bible outside a church with the way a riot cop held the hand of an anti-democracy insurgent supporting a violent coup attempt at the Capitol
I’m afraid this isn’t accurate. Michael used to present comedy on C4 called A Stab in the Dark - and I’m afraid this is what he was doing while the rest of us were holding a leaders debate. Mr Johnson was invited and chose not to come. I wish he’d joined what was a very good prog
The bad news: the BBC licence fee is to increase from £157.50 to £159 a year from April 1. The good news? You can STILL listen to
@TimesRadio
totally for free👍
Are all the MPs criticising the policing of the
#ReclaimTheStreets
vigil tonight going to vote against the imminent
#policingbill
in parliament which would increase police powers to clamp down on protest?
The government is paying an undisclosed sum to Sir Philip Rutnam, who quit as the Home Office's permanent secretary accusing Home Secretary Priti Patel of a "vicious and orchestrated briefing campaign" against him. How much did this cost the taxpayer? Shouldn't we be told?
No one from the government has appeared on
@Channel4News
for three weeks, and for the entire week we have not been given the opportunity to ask a question at the press conference. Extraordinary lack of engagement during a global crisis.
#coronavirus
Thanks for the birthday messages. A zoom lunch with family and friends is a strange but nonetheless lovely way to celebrate the half century. Here’s to the day we can do it properly when this ghastly virus is dealt with.
In what kind of country do a bunch of men try to depose the PM and stitch up who takes over without election in the very week they were incapable of enacting the decision of a referendum in which half of them promised the undeliverable? The UK verges on democratic joke
Boris Johnson stops Vallance and Whitty answering question of what they think of Cummings behaviour. And denies
@bbclaurak
a follow up question to challenge that
If you tell black and brown people they should stop going on about racism, that there is less of it, or what they think is racism isn’t, or they should protest a less controversial way or concentrate on their job maybe ask yourself : am I the problem?
When you watch
#SittingInLimbo
and read and watch the real Anthony Bryan and discover just a handful of hundreds of Windrush scandal victims have yet had any compensation you might think about where else the thuggery is and where justice needs to be done.
A personal opinion : I hate being described as BAME or “a BAME person”. It is an OK acronym for speed and ease in writing, but isn’t universally understood and is weird in conversation. I still think it is better to refer to being from “ethnic minorities” or specific identities.
I hope the public service broadcasting review being asked to consider whether we still need regulated channels and news services beyond the BBC looks to what has happened in America and thinks ‘let’s not allow that to happen here’.
Yet again the Govt refuses to appear on
#C4News
to answer questions about our latest revelations about the safety of PPE for NHS workers. If now is not the time to answer and learn the lessons, when is?
How does the Head of the National Institute for Health Protection who is in charge of Test and Trace not know basic school science? Dido Harding tells MPs : "We've seen the virus mutate...which was something none of us were able to predict"
Government says "affordability" is the key when it comes to health service pay, knowing they are a workforce who will mostly do the job whatever the pay rise. Was money no object with private sector PPE contracts because they were motivated by profit, not service?
Sad and mystified that Boris Johnson is not being allowed onto
@Channel4News
today. Our many viewers would like to see him explain his Brexit and other plans and see him scrutinised by us. He’s a grown up. He can take serious questions. It is a missed opportunity for him.
In a former life, when I thought you cd politely persuade people not to be racist
Their response? "If you don't like it here, LEAVE". Which I'm yet to hear said to a white British person
Racism is telling black people who have a critique of their own country, they should leave
It was kind of
@michaelgove
to turn up at
@Channel4News
tonight offering to come on the
#climatedebate
but the other party leaders will only debate other party leaders. We look forward to welcoming Mr Gove another time.
Channel 4 News audience share has grown 23% on last year and 56% among 16-34s, according to audience research on first 29 weeks of 2022. Suggests in turbulent times (Ukraine, political and economic crisis) people still seek long form, analytical and challenging news.
A friend points out that Allegra Stratton - who was a good journalist - never actually held a No 10 press conference but is now famous for a pretend one. Now the face of a scandal, but she was the PM’s spokesperson, working for him, in a culture he created. Will he own it?
Badly handled. Of course nobody worries about a BBC journalist saying we live in a world where you can’t smash up shops. Thank God he didn’t say anything really controversial like racism is bad.
You should not be able to tell whether or not journalists think terrorism or genocide or racism or paedophilia or climate change are good or bad things.
The UK has got just over half a million doses of the Oxford vaccine available from Monday while India has already made around 50 million and expects to double that soon.
Shouldn’t every PM candidate or supporter saying they’d leave No Deal on table explain what it means? For NHS, going on holiday, pet passports, food prices, house prices, jobs, imported medication, Northern Ireland. Current discourse seems blinded by excitement at beauty contest
Yesterday he rejected calls by
@Keir_Starmer
to scrap the NHS surcharge for foreign health and care workers. Today
@BorisJohnson
backed down. The second rethink in two days. Popular policy can become unpopular quite quickly, it turns out.
This from
@telegraph
WhatsApp leak might be why Rishi Sunak thinks everyone should study maths until 18. Maybe it suggests politicians should be sent to maths lessons before being allowed to make decisions.
Quite important to understand the Withdrawal Agreement Bill self evidently did not pass parliament. It passed the second reading. It now would be debated in the Commons and Lords before passing parliament. Boris Johnson paused it, and therefore delayed it again.
If you frame this as the “don’t mention the war” episode but don’t quote the scene about “ni**ers” and “wogs” then it obviously seems absurd. If you call it the “ni**ers and wogs episode” it might make people think.