Sloppy BBC managers should learn from nightclub bouncers

When I was a young, foolish 18 year old, I lent my passport to my 17 year old cousin to use as photo ID at a nightclub. We looked similar, the photograph was poor quality, it would be dark – and she really, really wanted to go to her best friend’s birthday party. We were nervous, but reassured ourselves that we’d done everything in our power to avoid detection: she knew my birthday, my place of birth, and everywhere I’d travelled back to front – and, for good measure, she’d even memorised my passport number. Surely even the most conscientious bouncer couldn’t possibly rumble us.

Unfortunately for my cousin and I, Fabric (the club in question) was on an underage crackdown that night. On questioning, my cousin fluently recited all my details – but the man on the door, “who wasn’t born yesterday” smelled a rat, and said that to convince him she was who she said she was, she must login to her social media accounts on his laptop. Unfazed, she blithely told him she didn’t have social media.

Immediately my passport was confiscated from her, and she was guided to the exit. It later transpired that every single visitor who’d made the same claim so far that evening had been using false identity.

This unfortunate incident came back to me last night, when it emerged that the BBC allowed an anti-Semitic Imam and a former Labour party worker to question Tory leadership hopefuls in last night’s TV debate. A screenshot of Mr Patel’s Twitter feed from 2014 posted on the Guido Fawkes website showed he shared a graphic of Israel’s outline superimposed on a map of the US under the headline “Solution for Israel-Palestine conflict – relocate Israel into United States.”

The BBC’s defence was that the tweets had come to light after Mr Patel re-activated a previously inactive Twitter profile in the aftermath of Tuesday’s debate, and had not been visible to its researchers before then.

Unlike bouncers at Fabric, BBC staff were – it seems – born yesterday. Rather than smelling a rat when Abdullah from Bristol – a politically and socially active young man – claimed not to have a social media presence, they asked him on live national TV to rigorously question the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom – with little or no further checks into his background.

And astonishingly, Abdullah wasn’t the only culprit in last night’s leaders’ debate. Another questioner, Aman, who asked the candidates whether they thought they should call a general election soon after becoming Prime Minister, turns out to be a Labour party staffer who worked on the party’s lacklustre inquiry into antisemitism, and who also stood as a Labour candidate in the 2018 local elections in Southwark.

In this instance, the BBC admitted that they knew of about Aman’s background, but defended their decision to have him on, saying that there were also “self-described Conservatives on the show.” The BBC, it seems, can’t understand the distinction between somebody who votes for a particular party and somebody who works, or has worked for a political party, and  could have well have taken instruction from that party as to what to ask.

One way or another, the woeful leadership debate last night was thoroughly embarrassing for the BBC. And though the young, poorly paid researchers who didn’t dig deep enough into the backgrounds of the questioners shouldn’t lose their jobs, at least one of the ludicrously overpaid BBC managers certainly should. I can recommend a good bouncer at Fabric who, I’m sure, would be delighted to take over.