Polemicist demands the truth about Brexit

A piece today by unlikely Garundista P Oborne:

Boris Johnson continues to get away with it. The onslaught of lies has become a tsunami...A particularly distasteful batch concerns his use of the London Bridge terror attack as a campaign tool...on Sunday he wheeled out four or five more, including the daft claim that Jeremy Corbyn will disband MI5, and another that Labour was responsible for the London Bridge attacker’s early release... Meanwhile, Johnson has scarcely been interrogated about the biggest lie of all. It lurks there in plain sight: the Tory slogan “Get Brexit Done”.

More bigoted statements emerge from Johnson’s press clippings – such as his claim in 1995 [!] that the children of single mothers were “ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate”...[and his]...  offensive comparison between Muslim women and bank robbers [close to a lie itself here -- Johnson was criticising  Muslim women who wore burkas, a small minority, someone pointed out recently -- and then defending their right to wear what they liked]

Oborne is no stranger to polemic himself, of course, but he likes to  stress his moral superiority, resigning from the Telegraph on principle (here). Formerly, he was quite annoyed at the BBC's Newsnight for organising a little Remainer cosy chat between E Davis and N Watt, but now he is a major spokesperson for Project Fear and regularly berates the media for 'not telling the truth' about the dire consequences of Brexit. It's a simple truth for him, as usual, and good old small c Tories like him are the only ones who can access it. It must be frustrating when people just do not listen to their betters. He has a website recording 'lies' told by Boris --most of them pretty feeble bits of political polemic or silly bragging

He gets a bit class warrior when he says this uncritical stance depends on Johnson's:

membership of the traditional British establishment with celebrity status among the contemporary media elite...Britain’s three most powerful newspaper groups (the Telegraph, the Murdoch press and Associated Newspapers) fervently support the Conservative party...the Times, the voice of Britain’s professional class, has been so stridently in favour of Johnson.[really? They expose the lies as readily as anyone in my view] 

The main target here is the BBC though:

The British Broadcasting Corporation is bound by rigorous rules of impartiality [that old complaint -- why can't just tell the truth] that do not apply to newspapers [or to impassioned commentators who are simply telling the truth] ..the BBC has been behaving in a way that favours the Tories...After a dishevelled Johnson made a mess of placing a red wreath at the Cenotaph, ahead of the silence on Remembrance Sunday, BBC Breakfast showed footage of a much smarter Johnson placing a green wreath...the BBC edited a clip to cut out the audience laughter at the prime minister during the party leaders’ Question Time...

Jill Rutter, a senior research fellow at The UK in a Changing Europe [!], highlighted the way in which many senior journalists, including the BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, had become overly dependent on private briefings from Johnson’s strategy chief, Dominic Cummings...When Johnson made his notorious “there is no press here” claim in front of the cameras at Whipps Cross hospital in east London– while being quizzed by a father anxious over his sick daughter – Kuenssberg came to his rescue [didn't work if she did]. Passing over the prime minister’s falsehood at the time, she sent out a tweet stating that the father was a Labour activist.

Research by Justin Schlosberg of Birkbeck, University of London, shows how the BBC (and other TV channels) paid huge attention when the obscure former Labour MP Ian Austin endorsed the Tories. Those channels paid far less attention when Ken Clarke, a political giant, suggested he would not vote Tory.  

So are they all Johnsonites? Oborne moves on from simple bias a bit:

The BBC does not have a party political bias: it is biased towards the government of the day....the corporation allowed itself to be bullied, manipulated and played by the New Labour government. William Hague’s Tories were almost as hard done-by as Corbyn is today. The memo from the then Newsnight editor Peter Horrocks to his team after the 1997 general election – calling for a very much different, and softer, analysis of New Labour in power than its Tory predecessor – remains notorious.

And gets closer to the issue:

Like other great institutions, including parliament, it has been shaken by Brexit.

Especially by the public ignoring its 'truths' and getting quite cross with its superiority -- Aunty has not the authority nor the affection which she once had after her prolonged lecturing and scolding and is now trying to restore its 'balance'?