Few would recognise them, and even fewer know their names, but for more than half a century the BBC’s Political Research Unit has employed some of the most influential men and women in Westminster.
Numbering around 15 staff, typically a mixture of fresh-faced graduates and experienced polling analysts, the organisation’s job is to supply key information data to staff who bring the nation its daily news.
Its team provides specialist briefings to famous reporters, and helps the makers of the BBC’s most revered shows — from Newsnight and Today to the evening news bulletins — navigate disputed points of fact.
Traditionally, these semi-official arbiters of right and wrong have tended to toil behind the scenes. But lately, the Political Research Unit has begun to step out of the shadows.
In recent weeks, members have been popping up on our TV screens to analyse breaking stories, telling viewers whether a particular politician may have issued a misleading statement, or even be telling fibs. And therein lies a growing political controversy.
A few years back Oscar Bentley told Twitter followers ‘there are vertebrates, invertebrates, and then there are Tory MPs’
He has also boasted of ‘shouting “Tories out!” at the gates of Downing Street,’ which he dubbed ‘immensely satisfying’
For as the public face of BBC fact-checking, at this crucial moment in the electoral cycle, members of the Political Unit must exhibit absolute impartiality. The slightest whiff of political bias could, given their hugely-important role, seriously damage public trust in the Corporation.
All of which brings us to Politics Live, the high-profile daytime show, which has in recent weeks run occasional slots in which members of the team are placed in front of the camera.
On Wednesday, the man in the firing line was a staffer named Oscar Bentley. In his TV debut, he provided a sceptical analysis of crime statistics that had been shared by Rishi Sunak at Prime Minister’s Questions.
Specifically: Sunak claimed offences had halved under the Tories. Bentley pointed out that this was based on an ONS estimate that doesn’t include figures for fraud, perhaps the fastest-growing area of criminality.
Delivering what was effectively an official BBC verdict — namely that the PM, while entitled to make the claim, was playing somewhat fast and loose with numbers — Bentley was presented to viewers as a sort of even-handed analyst who would objectively navigate a statistical minefield without fear or favour.
Yet as yesterday’s Mail revealed, the 25-year-old Bentley is actually a dyed-in-the-wool Labour supporter who canvassed for the former party leader Jeremy Corbyn, and who has said you should ‘never trust a Tory’.
Indeed, a dossier of highly partisan and at times revoltingly offensive posts he’d uploaded to social media prior to joining the BBC, which has been doing the rounds of Westminster, shows him to be perhaps the least suitable person imaginable to be offering analysis of party-political disputes.
It reveals that a few years back he told Twitter followers ‘there are vertebrates, invertebrates, and then there are Tory MPs’ and has boasted of ‘shouting “Tories out!” at the gates of Downing Street,’ which he dubbed ‘immensely satisfying’.
On other occasions, Bentley has described Labour as ‘my lads,’ talked of helping canvass for the party, and on the night of a general election posted: ‘Please win Jeremy Corbyn, I love you so much, be my Prime Minister, please.’
It’s a — shall we say — unfortunate set of beliefs for someone to hold if their day job is being a supposedly unbiased political fact-checker for a publicly funded broadcaster.
He has also shared advertisements for ‘Veganuary’ along with a flyer for a 2017 demonstration Mr Bentley attended in the centre of York while he was studying, slamming Conservative York outer MP Julian Sturdy
Yet astonishingly, given the nature of their work, the Political Research Unit appears to operate in a world where staff who have voiced highly partisan support for Labour — and levelled offensive slurs against the Conservatives — are routinely welcomed with open arms.
You don’t have to look very hard to find examples. Take Lauren Tavriger, an Oxford graduate who works alongside Bentley in the unit, and back in January co-authored a piece of analysis for the BBC’s website about political funding that kicked off by stating: ‘Conservative-held constituencies in Parliament were the biggest winners in this latest round of levelling up funding.’
Prior to joining our national broadcaster in September, I can reveal that she had a full-time job at the Left-wing anti- Brexit lobby group Best For Britain. There, Tavriger’s duties included writing opinion articles for its website, many of which display staggering bias against Conservatives.
In May last year, for example, she urged readers to use tactical voting to ‘finally get rid of this law-breaking, tax-avoiding, truth-twisting, anti-democratic, poverty-inducing government’.
It criticised the ‘charlatans in No 10’ and expressed regret that ‘even while the Prime Minister is in disrepute and the party in disarray, Labour are not storming ahead in the polls’.
In June, when Boris Johnson was coming under pressure to quit, she told readers that ‘this week’s events have demonstrated just how loathed the Prime Minister actually is’.
The piece concluded ‘Johnson will trundle on for as long as he possibly can. But while he continues to cling onto power by the skin of his teeth, he continues to damage the country. Not that he really cares, it’s what he’s been doing for almost three years, with his thin, unworkable Brexit deal, lost growth, labour shortages and growing NHS waiting times there to prove it’.
That article summed up the Conservative Prime Minister thus: ‘Law breaker at home, law breaker abroad. It doesn’t matter to him. As long as he’s still “world king”.’
As for social issues, she also wrote an article before the World Cup supporting England players for ‘taking the knee’ before football matches.
‘Taking the knee is not an act of political gain. Nor is it an act of division. It’s an act of patriotism. Or at least the kind of patriotism that Best For Britain believes in. The kind of patriotism that celebrates our internationalism and history of migration.’
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Tavriger is no fan of the current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, either. Eighteen months back, she offered an analysis of his budget: ‘Behind the smoke and mirrors, the cheering, the jeering and the unprecedented leaking, it is clear that the Budget more than falls short. Yet Sunak happily declared that this spending will kickstart our “post”-Covid economy, and propel us into a new “age of optimism”.
‘Much like our rivers and seas, this budget stinks. Following a screeching U-Turn … sky-high Covid cases reported today, and shortages on pretty much everything, we’re going to need more than just optimism. Unfortunately for us, that’s all this lot have.’
Now, of course, the same Lauren Tavriger — who regards Conservatives as ‘truth-twisting’ and ‘law-breaking’ — is supposed to park her deeply held prejudices in order to tell BBC viewers whether they are more trustworthy than the Labour party she so clearly adores.
Doubtless she (like all colleagues) strives to be even handed. But this is, at best, a contentious look for the BBC’s supposedly impartial fact-checking department. Or, if truth be told, for the Corporation as a whole.
Among the other recent staffers is Daniel Kraemer, who left the Unit last year and moved to a job at Radio Four. His previous jobs include a stint as office manager to a Labour MP named Lyn Brown, though it should be stressed that he has not used social media to smear political opponents.
Then there is Joseph Cassidy, who recently departed to work on Laura Kuenssberg’s show.
During his time at university, which coincided with the Corbyn era, he was caught up in a campus anti-Semitism row after it emerged that he previously used Twitter to declare: ‘Israel doesn’t have a right to exist. I mean, it’s there now, so there’s no getting rid of it, but it’s a stupid idea.’
Little wonder that senior Conservatives are up in arms. Lee Anderson MP, deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, said in reaction: ‘This so-called “impartial” research unit is little more than a hard-Left cabal.
In a separate post, he uploaded an image of a terrier with a caption endorsing ‘dogs for Corbyn’, telling friends he was: ‘Spamming all of my social media with this pic because of the insanely cute doggy. Important politics too’
‘The BBC needs to have a proper investigation into how these Lefty loonies have been let loose into this team.’
And Craig Tracey MP, vice chair of the Conservative Party, said: ‘These revelations about the BBC’s Political Research Unit are both shocking and concerning.
‘Given their role as an independent fact-checking service for the BBC, an investigation into how far these significantly political biases have permeated is absolutely needed.’
Asked about these and other partisan posts, the BBC insists that views expressed by a member of staff before they joined the Corporation are irrelevant to their ability to behave with impartiality once they are there.
‘The BBC’s Political Research Unit has a long history of recruiting people from a range of backgrounds across the political spectrum. Any views people express before joining the BBC are completely irrelevant; when they join the BBC they put their past political activity and opinions aside,’ is the party line.
Public trust was, of course, easier to hold before the days of social media, when there were fewer records of people’s views on politics or other hot topics, making it harder for the public to know what staff in the Political Research Unit might have thought about the news stories of the day. Established in the 1960s, it was originally the creation of a Canadian pollster named Robert McKenzie, who came out of the woodwork every few years for an ‘election special’ programme in which he popularised the swingometer.
He created a small team of researchers whose job was to supply facts and data to reporters, interpreting and running opinion polls, and provide directories containing contact details for MPs and guides to party conferences.
Over the years, they became a crucial part of the BBC’s news- gathering operation, using the computer revolution to create information-packed databases that journalists would consult.
A profile in the mid-1990s described them as ‘the information centre that helps to drive the news and current affairs department at the BBC’.
During the Blair era, the Unit’s commitment to impartiality was the subject of some murmurings of discontent after a number of senior figures left to work in Downing Street.
They included its head Bill Bush, who took a job running Labour’s ‘rapid rebuttal’ unit, which sought to discredit unhelpful news stories, Catherine Rimmer, its deputy head, who ended up as Blair’s chief of staff, and Peter Hyman, a staffer who went on to become a Labour press officer and is now senior aide to Sir Keir Starmer.
Crucially, however, it maintained a semblance of balance by employing staff who went on to work in Tory circles, including Robbie Gibb, who went on to become Theresa May’s spin doctor, Jonathan Isaby, now an aide to Liz Truss, and Matthew Offord, now Tory MP for Hendon.
Perhaps more importantly, in the days before the internet, allegiances of staff only became apparent after they had left to take up political jobs.
Even then, the mask would occasionally slip. After the 2016 Brexit referendum, the Unit’s former boss David Cowling, a Left-leaning pollster who, employed on an occasional freelance basis by the BBC, was revealed to have leaked a withering internal memo telling colleagues that the organisation’s institutional metropolitan bias meant it had fallen out of touch with ordinary ‘ghastly’ Britons.
‘It seems to me that the London bubble has to burst if there is to be any prospect of addressing the issues that have brought us to our current situation.
‘There are many millions of people in the UK who do not enthuse about diversity and do not embrace metropolitan values yet do not consider themselves lesser human beings for all that,’ it read.
‘Until their values and opinions are acknowledged and respected, rather than ignored and despised, our present discord will persist. Because these discontents run very wide and very deep and the metropolitan political class, confronted by them, seems completely bewildered and at a loss about how to respond (“who are these ghastly people and where do they come from?” doesn’t really hack it).’
Cowling’s experience on the front-line of the BBC had, in other words, convinced him that its overwhelmingly Left-leaning staff were out of touch with the public they are employed to serve.
Seven years later, the controversy engulfing its Political Research Unit shows that little has changed: for all the lip-service it pays to impartiality, the BBC and its staff stand accused of shaping our political landscape in their own, partisan image.
