Chris Mason, the BBC's Farage fanboy

Last year Chris Mason, the BBC’s political editor, came under fire after penning a review of Reform’s annual conference in Birmingham that was so fawning it could have come from the party’s press office.

Under the headline ‘Reform conference shows party’s growing ambition like never before’, Mason wrote that the Midlands shindig was “the most fascinating party conference I have ever been to”, telling readers that it “illustrates the pace of growth of Reform UK” and “now feels like a big party conference – but retains the insurgency vibe that the party is seeking to channel”.

The cringing coverage attracted plenty of opprobrium online, including from Steve Richards, a regular presenter of Radio 4’s Week in Westminster, who wrote on X: “What a naive, gullible assessment… but his bosses – in the unlikely event they bother to read it – will approve.” Others noted that Mason had failed to notice that one of the “fascinating” conference’s star turns was Greater Lincolnshire mayor Andrea Jenkyns, clad in a sequinned jumpsuit, singing a self-penned song about insomnia and Jesus. Nor did he think it worthy to mention the conference’s closing act – a conspiracy theorist who said it was “highly likely” that the Covid vaccine was linked to the King and Princess of Wales’s cancers.

Has the £270,000-a-year Mason learnt his lesson? Not if his coverage of Suella Braverman’s defection from the Tories to Reform on Monday is anything to go by. Indeed, it was so cheering of Nigel Farage’s apparent coup that the BBC eventually had to change the headline to tone it down.

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Under the initial headline ‘Chris Mason: Another big beast defection shows momentum is with Reform’, the political editor wrote: “While anyone drawing up a list of potential Conservative defectors to Reform would have put Braverman near the top, this was still a big moment. She is a former Conservative home secretary, a big beast of recent Tory history.” Alas, space constraints prevented him from mentioning how she was sacked twice from the role within the space of a year.

Mason continued: “Her switch emphasises the momentum Reform are showing in draining the Conservative Party and in particular its Right: a fortnight ago it was former Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi, the week before last it was Robert Jenrick, a week ago it was Andrew Rosindell, now it is Suella Braverman.

“On stage at her defection, Braverman shared Reform’s diagnosis that Britain is broken, a label the Conservatives disagree with. And like Jenrick before her, she offered a devastating critique of her former party’s recent governing record.”

What Mason might have added, but didn’t, is that at local government level the once-insurgent Reform have lost five of the seven by-elections held in the last week alone as voters get to see how incompetently they have governed, and that their average polling is down between five and seven points compared with the time of the conference he so enjoyed.

Eventually Beeb bosses stepped in and changed the headline to the slightly less cheerleading ‘Chris Mason: Both Tories and Labour feel the Reform heebie-jeebies’. But the rest of the copy remained the same.