Nigel Farage’s Reform party currently polls as the third largest, well ahead of the Lib Dems and Greens, and just a smidgen behind the governing Tories. So why has the BBC placed him on the far left edge of tonight’s debate line up, like he doesn’t matter? Did the leaders draw lots for positioning? If not, and given that Penny Mordaunt for the Government is also marginalised out on the far right, the BBC’s positioning looks bizarre.
And that brings us to the audience, which at times appeared not to include a single Reform supporter, willing to applaud Farage. Given that some polls say that nearly one in five voters are planning to back Reform, this relative absence of support seemed odd too.
Meanwhile, despite the debate taking place in England, the leaders of the nationalist SNP and Plaid Cymru, from Scotland and Wales, were getting plenty of audience encouragement. Where on earth did tonight’s audience come from? We can forgive such sentiment with Have I got News For You, but this is slightly more serious.
Farage, of course, was not disturbed by these oddities, which isn’t surprising as he’s faced similar treatment throughout his career. He knows full well that it’s the watching TV audience that really counts, not the handful of people willing to give up their Friday evening to sit in a TV studio.
But given that the BBC has had to apologise in the last few days after one of its newsreaders inexcusably broke its code of impartiality and described Farage as using “customary inflammatory language”, we should keep our eyes and ears open for how our national broadcaster chooses to present politicians.