Chris Mason’s defence of the BBC over Farage coverage goes badly wrong

The BBC’s £270,000-a-year political editor Chris Mason picked the wrong day to defend himself and the broadcaster from accusations that they were giving Nigel Farage and Reform too easy a ride.

Mason used an interview with Lib Dem leader Ed Davey at the party’s conference to accuse him of Trumpian tactics and peddling “straightforwardly a falsehood” after Davey told LBC: “I think the BBC needs to do a lot better job exposing [Farage] for the snake oil salesman that he is. Sometimes I look at the BBC website and it’s almost as if they’ve taken a Reform press release and copied and pasted it.”

Mason seemed to be outraged at suggestions that Reform were getting too much free publicity. Yet within a couple of hours, the BBC News channel showed the entirety of a 56-minute Reform press conference about their badly thought-through plans to end indefinite leave to remain and benefits for non-EU migrants. That this hour-long exposure for another party was shown during the Lib Dems’ conference has not escaped their attention.

Despite the criticism, Davey stood firm against Mason, telling him: “I do think we’ve seen some poor practice in parts of the BBC. When it’s not performing its role, it’s not unreasonable, is it, for people to call it out?”

He added: “We do find the BBC website does seem to give the Reform approach rather more, without scrutiny.

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“Liberal Democrats have been the champions of the BBC over many, many years. There’s not enough scrutiny of Reform on the BBC website in my view. Don’t take my word, take it from many of your viewers who’ve complained to us.”

Davey told Mason that his own reporting was not in question. Yet the BBC is understood to have received several complaints about Mason’s gushing report from Reform’s conference earlier in September.

Mason ignored altogether embarrassments like Andrea Jenkyns’s bizarre appearance – singing a self–penned song about insomnia and God – as well as a ludicrous and offensive speech by vaccine sceptic Dr Assem Malhotra in which he claimed that Covd jabs had given members of the royal family cancer.

Instead, he wrote that the event had been “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”.

Mason continued that had spotted “a queue of folk waiting for Nigel Farage to sign their light blue Reform UK football shirt, bought at the nearby merchandise shop. The number 10 and Farage on the back of them all is not exactly subtle about this movement’s ambitions. Can you imagine Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch, Ed Davey or John Swinney pulling that off? Not in a million years.”