hello. can a savvy media strategy save borisjohnson? headline—grabbing policies are being rolled out this week in what's been dubbed operation red meat. but is there really such an operation? we're also looking at the apparently cosy relationship between those in government who set policy, and the media, which is supposed to hold them to account. and we're asking what the new bbc licence fee deal means for the industry at large. let me introduce you to my guests. joeyjones was spokesman for theresa may when she was home secretary. before that, he was a deputy political editor at sky news. helen lewis writes for the atlantic. laura hughes, political correspondent for the financial times. and phil riley is the chief executive of boom radio and has had a long career in commercial radio, including running chrysalis and overseeing its sale to global and phil, we'll be talking a lot in the programme about the revolving door between journalism and politics and times radio havejust snapped up, ruth davidson, the former scottish conservative leader. why are ex politicians so popular with you? any room for one more on boom radio? well, i think we i actually started back in lbc when i was chief exec there in 200a. we invited tony blair to do a phone—in and literally sit there and push the faders and take the calls. so i'm probably to blame for all of this. i think we took the view and certainly the people that now run lbc have taken this to fantastic level that actually it's great to have an unmediated opportunity for listeners to speak directly to politicians. it's great whatjournalists do, and theyjournalists have got knowledge and detail to bring to the party. but it's great also to be able to have real people unmediated, talking directly and getting the views of politicians. and i think it's a good thing and it's been a good thing for democracy, and it'll be interesting to see how ruth gets on on times radio. good luck to them. 0k, phil, we'll come back to you in a moment. but let's start with the dramatic scenes that i expect will be dominating tomorrow's front pages. borisjohnson appeared at prime minister's questions today after a pretty dramatic morning, which included an mp defecting from the conservatives to labour. what did you make of it all? well, it was, not to sound like a football commentator, but it was an event of two halves at the beginning. you started with this enormous bombshell of a tory mp, the labour partyjust minutes before the prime minister faced parliament. and that felt like a real, real sort of moment which actually served in the prime minister's favour because i think it scooped a few tory mps who are getting a bit nervous now. but then, at the very end of prime minister's questions, david davis, a former cabinet minister, a very sort of senior veteran tory stood up and delivered this extraordinarily dramatic line to the prime minister, where he quoted a former tory cabinet minister in 1940, basically telling chamberlain it was time to go. and that was incredibly damaging for a prime minister who we all know wants to be winston churchill, not neville chamberlain. and i think we can hear that now, that sound bite which will be played in all the bulletins, i imagine. so i'll remind him of a quotation altogether too familiar to him of leo amery to neville chamberlain. you have sat there too long for all the good you have done. in the name of god, go. you're the former spokesman for theresa may, as well as having worked at sky. i mean, tell us, how does it work from the inside? will the political spin rooms be operating like crazy, kind of making sure that their lines, their views? their spin is reported in the press today and tomorrow? well, i sat in the press gallery, obviously as a journalist a number of times and in the press gallery you can actually see the two teams from the two sides. the spinners, the heads of communication and they struggle to have pokerfaces, if you like, as pmqs is actually going on and not to to wince or to sort of punch the air with delight when their contender lands a blow. so what will they be doing today? i think borisjohnson�*s team will have felt most of the time that it was a better pmqs for him the last week. and i think that it was quite a scrappy pmqs in general. and the tone was odd because the labour party, with their new recruit, were in very boisterous form, and that meant that there was much more sort of cut and thrust and levity actually and mockery from keir starmer towards the prime minister. borisjohnson was much better able to better equipped to deal with than the contrition that you could see he found very difficult on last week's pmqs and indeed notably in that interview that took place with beth rigby yesterday. we can see why you were good at yourjob back then. helen lewis from the atlantic. that quote from david davis, you know, it's the kind of quote that newspaper editors dream of, isn't it? yeah, i thought it was very interesting to go back and have a look at the hansard records of that 1940 debate because leo amery, who delivered it the first time, well, the second time after oliver cromwell also sort of whispered it. and that was to me the most interesting thing. the kind of drag ends of pmqs without being rude to backbench mps can often deteriorate into which the prime minister likes to say anything about the opening of my new garden centre. and so what was interesting was there was, as gerry says, it was a very heckling pmqs. but actually, when david davis stood up, it fell silent. and i think that was because people thought, hang on a minute, this is the kind of guy who might lob a grenade into the chamber. and sure enough, he did. and there have been some reports since then saying, well, actually, this and the defection of rallied the tory mp round because they don't like kind of rank disloyalty. but i think it's very hard to think of something else that is a more arresting visual moment from today that it will be on the bulletins. 0k, well, let's think about how borisjohnson and his team have responded to it all because, you know, we keep hearing news reports of something called operation red meat. laura hughes from the financial times. what is operation red meat? is it even real? it doesn't sound like it is real, but unfortunately it is. and the idea behind it is people around noio and round. the prime minister are chucking out these big headline grabbing announcements in the hope that it will remind the great british public that the pm is focused on delivering for them and will distract away from all these party allegations because that's what the pm's actually trying to say every time he stands up that let's stop talking about these ridiculous stories and let's, you know, let me get on with thejob. but it's clearly been quite a rushed process of getting out these massive headline—grabbing announcements. the bbc funding one, for example, the ft reported this morning that there were cabinet ministers yesterday who were concerned they'd been bounced into supporting this. it was all very rushed. the same goes for the policy announcement that came a couple of days ago, so the government said they would send the military and the navy to help deal with the small boats crisis and a lot of sort of royal navy chiefs and mps themselves on the tory side criticising that. it all feels very rushed, a little bit desperate to try and distract us all. and we will come back to the bbc licence fee later. butjerryjones, you know, as someone who was theresa may's spokesman when she was home secretary, do you believe what's happened this week is a deliberate distraction technique and did you ever resort to it? i think it was a pointless technique. i mean, a pointless attempt at distraction, if you like. i mean, either borisjohnson is being badly advised or he's being very well advised and he's ignoring the advice. but whichever it is, he's ending up trying to, as i say, sort of tick, tick box populist policies to allow some of his potential critics on the backbenches to feel that their hobbyhorse issue is being advanced. at the same time as the british public and the activists, the tory activists can see that he looks a broken man, and those optics, i think, have a much more profound impact than any policy that he might try to put forward to in a sort of kneejerk reaction. and helen lewis from the atlantic, i mean, in the sunday papers, various newspapers, the telegraph and sunday times, they were reporting it as a blizzard of crowd pleasing policies. you know, laura's touched on it, but you know, one of them was the announcement about the bbc licence fee, within a few hours, lo and behold, the culture secretary, nadine dorries, was tweeting on sunday about that bbc deal. so does that mean that we should see the bbc deal, as laura was suggesting as part of operation dead meat? oh, yes. one of the many operations going on, operation save big dog is, i think, still the worst named of all the operations this week. but what i thought was interesting about that is the way that nadine dorries, obviously her team had briefed the mail on sunday and then she tweeted about it. and then when it came to the commons, she couldn't quite put the pedal to the metal on that. and it became kind of, i think we should all have a really serious debate about how the bbc�*s funded now. there was a very good piece in the times this morning byjohn whittingdale, who was a very strong critic of the bbc, was previously at the culture brief, saying what everybody knows, which is that if you want to abolish the licence fee, it really falls to you to come up with an alternative model. and so far, no one has managed to do this to the satisfaction of everybody. you know, advertising has got its huge problems. lots of parents, for example, really love being able to put their kids in front of programming that doesn't have any advertising in it. and any kind of subscription model is very hard to do when a lot of people who use bbc services, particularly older people, don't have reliable broadband. yeah, i mean, i'd like to bring in phil riley here, chief executive of boom radio. you know, you've built up radio stations, you know, commercial radio really well. let's take nadine dorries at face value. you know, if this is the last licence fee to be announced as she's suggesting, how could the bbc be funded? helen was touching on a couple of options, but what are the options, do you think? i think helen hit the nail on the head, really. i don't think there is really another funding model that works for anything like the scale of bbc that we have today. subscription is an interesting idea, but it falls very badly when you consider that 18 million households in the uk access their television via freeview. freeview, it's impossible to put subscription on freeview. it hasn't got conditional access, so there's 18 million people. if you take the bbc off them, the freeview model falls over the bbc. if it were to go down, the subscription route simply can't have bbc radio any more. because radio is subscription free. there's no subscription for radio, it's a free to air service and no subscription company is going to throw £5 6 million a year into the pot of funding free to air radio. you get into whether or not you have to make the radio services ad funded that then has a knock on effect for the commercial sector, as well as having, i should say, a huge effect on bbc radio. were it to be ad funded, you can because... sorry to interrupt, but basically, you know, we could talk about, we probably will end up talking about this licence fee over and over on the media show. we'll look at telly, but you know, in terms of radio which you know about, are you suggesting that actually it might affect the whole of radio in the uk, notjust the bbc? yeah, my rough back of a cigarette packet calculation suggests that if you were to divest bbc radio in its totality from television as a result of tv going subscription only you would have to. you'd have to close down, i'm afraid, bbc local radio and all the nation's radio. they simply are not commercially sustainable given their audience level and the costs involved. nobody would touch them in a privatised world and try and make money out of them. they're simply not commercially sustainable. so this isn't about making a kind of kneejerk defend the bbc case. this is about thinking about the rest of the radio industry. the commercial world would be affected. not only would all those bbc local and nation services closed down — the bbc networks collectively, one, two, three, four and five could just about survive if they were prepared to cut their cost base by about their content costs by about 60%. well, good luck saving the good bits of the bbc that people know and love if you have to take 60% off the cost and then the third leg of this is that the commercial sector, if the bbc, if the networks were taking commercials, the commercial sector would suddenly find its own revenue base cut back by ten, 15, 20%. therefore, the commercial sector is making no money. all of the investment that the commercial sector has put into radio over the past ten, 15, 20, 25 years really as commercial has really grown in the last 25 years. that's all for nothing, too. bbc radio is 100 years old this year. commercial radio is 50 years old next year. if this came to pass, it would be a terrible indictment on this government that they would throw away a cultural part of this country that is so well established and that 90% of the population, you know, listen to every week. it really, you know, radio is always forgotten in these conversations, and it's terribly sad to see that once again, that's the case. nadine dorries simply didn't even contemplate radio, probably when she made her announcement. but there are people in the commercial sector who feel that bbc radio, for example, is too big. it strays into their territory. so what is their appetite out there for it to be reined in? i think there's yes, we are constantly arguing to government and to ofcom that the bbc funding model, which is essentially public money, it's a tax in one form or another needs to make sure that then the bbc adheres to the highest standards in terms of the content contract they have with ofcom. i think ofcom have been actually less forceful than the old bbc governors were and i think that's a mistake and we should and we do try and press ofcom harder on that. but radio one and radio two that people worry about as being too commercial and, you know, getting back into getting into territory that they shouldn't be in? to a degree, although i think you have to, you have to acknowledge if you're going to allow the bbc to be in the radio business, it's going to have to be in most bits of the radio business and therefore it will be in the popular music end. but we are we expect if they're being funded the way they are, that that they do more than just play the hits, that they have a breadth of music and a breadth of subject matter, which you know, should be in a contract that they have with the population, if you like, through their ofcom contract and that needs to be enforced. and the other element you've said, katie, is the bbc is extraordinarily well funded compared to the commercial sector. and i think one of our concerns has always been that they appear to be so well—funded that they can then go and do things which are simply not possible for us to compete with. whether it's launching new services on a whim without really checking whether they're filling a commercial need or outbidding the commercial sector for massive amounts of sports content on radio. in television, they've opted out of doing that, but in radio they're still doing that and just spending money in a way that we can't compete with. if ijust bring you in, you know, you looked at bbc funding, i think when you were in government is axing the licence fee by 2028 a realistic possibility, do you think? actually, the period i looked at it was when i was supporting the dcms select committee as a specialist adviser during their inquiry into the wider public service broadcasting landscape. and of course, they did have john whittingdale in front of them at that time answering questions and i think that i mean, i went into that inquiry thinking, yes, why doesn't the bbc have the courage of its convictions around some of its great content? why don't they ask people to pay for it and they could end up maybe making more money out of that than they do from the licence fee? but what i learned, as you've heard from helen and from phil, is that we don't have the infrastructure that would allow that to happen. a key tenet of the bbc has to be universality. and if ultimately you went down a subscription route, you would end up disenfranchising or cutting people off from bbc content at the most, most vulnerable fringes of our society. so people who are geographically remote or perhaps don't have the money to or the inclination to get onto high speed broadband, and that would be the last thing that anybody wants. so on that basis, there is a big problem with the licence fee coming because ultimately young people aren't, they're not watching on tv. so in some ways, a licence fee has to attach it to itself, to some other form of infrastructure that's more universally used. and also, young people aren't consuming bbc content in the way that older people do. but that that's something that needs to be considered. the argument that the government appears to want to be having is the wrong argument. ok, well, radio four is taking a deep dive into all these issues about how to fund the bbc if the licence fee goes. the briefing room with david aaronovitch is on thursday evening at 8pm on radio four and available via bbc sounds afterwards for listeners now who want even more on the licence fee. but for us today, let's zoom out of these discussions for a moment because within all these newspaper scoops about operation red meat and parties at downing street, there are some pretty difficult questions for the media to answer. for example, one of these parties was held the night before prince philip's funeral. it was a leaving party held forjames slack, a former daily mailjournalist who was working as borisjohnson�*s director of communications, and he's now back on fleet street as deputy editor in chief of the sun. helen lewis, writer at the atlantic, first up, can you just clarify how normal is it for a journalist to move between journalism and politics like that? well, it's enormously common in one direction, moving from journalism into politics, if you think about the fact that you know, david cameron's spokesman was craig oliver. you know, this is not, you know, labour had seamus milne from the guardian. you know, this is not an unusual thing at all. what's slightly more unusual in this case is moving back again so quickly. and also and that, i think, is the thing that makes it very hard because people are inevitably asking, hang on a minute is the sun reporting this with one hand tied behind its back because its own hierarchy are involved in the story? and that can be very difficult as a kind of conflict of interest to square, but also the way through this, you know, borisjohnson is a formerjournalist himself. he has great contacts in a number of papers. there has been, you know, an enormous problem of coziness and perhaps undeclared interests of people writing about this story that i do think has a really corrosive effect on on people's trust injournalism now. you know, you can't be a whitehall or lobby correspondent without having really brilliant sources. and sometimes those source relationships do tip over into friendships. but i think probably something we could learn from american journalism and as it pains me to say this is appropriate is that we need to be much more transparent about those relationships. you went through that revolving door. you were a deputy political editor at sky news before you went to work for theresa may in 2016. what is a politician buying when they offer a job of this kind? i think it depends on the individual politician. i mean, obviously if a politician is taking someone from the lobby, they would expect that individual to be very good at putting themselves in the shoes of a journalist and anticipating the way in which a story may develop where it might head. they understand the personalities at play because they've worked alongside those, those journalists as well. some politicians, i think, actually probably are better served by people who have a very different background. i mean, some of the best spin doctors were notjournalists. i remember sitting at the back of the red lion watching, watching damian mcbride firing off emails left, right and centre... gordon brown's spin doctor. absolutely, you know, pushing all the buttons of the sun lobby. he was absolutely a complete master of that. whereas i think borisjohnson, as helen says as somebody with a journalistic background, he probably would have been better served by someone like dominic cummings with his disdain for the lobby probably trying to reign in the prime minister's instincts, always to respond to the front page headline. so you're doing you're doing your colleagues, ex journalists out of a job because of course they remember, as you're saying, was not a journalist. so he was better at it than some of the people that have perhaps gone in there. but laura hughes, political correspondent at the ft, what was the benefit to the newspaper, you know, hiring someone like james slack straight out of downing street. what is the benefit to the sun of that? presumably, it works both ways, so the reason why a politician would hire a journalist is because a journalist like james, like, for example, was very good at preempting what we were going to ask. so it would work the other way as well in the sense that perhaps they thought he might have an insight into how government was working, would have good contacts there. but it's less it's less clear to me, actually that the benefits of that because whether or not what you would do, that i am not so sure. and there are lots of rules for people that do move between these two worlds that try and govern them. but i think what this story did make clear is that it can be incredibly awkward to move back and forth so soon after you've been in one role because of the questions that have inevitably come up about this, and we know that clearly he wasn't telling the sun about the parties that were going on, so they didn't get any insight from him, from having hired him. and, helen, i mentioned the telegraph. borisjohnson was their star columnist for years. they've supported him throughout this crisis. but it was the telegraph that broke the story about parties the night before prince philip's funeral. do you think borisjohnson has lost their support? i wouldn't bet against in some future time him being offered another massive contract to write telegraph columns if his, you know, reign of a thousand years ever end. obviously, who can imagine that happening? but what's interesting to me about the fact is, i think the telegraph have played this much more straight down the line actually, than the express, which has become a kind of boris johnson fanzine and the mail, which reheated a may 2020 sun story about keir starmer having a beer and there's a photograph of him by the window. and the telegraph have actually been a lot straighter down the line than perhaps anybody expected. you know, they did break the bring your own bottle story. theyjust didn't have that email, that incredibly incriminating email, so it didn't get as much play. they did break the story of the head of the covid task force having a leaving party, for example. but i think it is significant to me that tory supporting papers, papers have been very sympathetic to brexit have been willing, particularly in recent days, tojoin what otherwise might have been dismissed as a kind of leftie luvvie dismissal of, you know, minor things that real people who actually care about real issues don't. you know, this is you can sense it sometimes when you're a journalist, there isjust a kind of pack mentality. and what's become fascinating is watching that pack mentality kind of take over here. and there is now real competition among lobby hacks about who can find the next scoop and detail because there is a lot you know, what we have is always in systems is checks and balances. and one of them here is the fact that every individual reporter wants to be the one to nail the absolutely amazing scoop that brings down a government and that is counteracted by the perhaps the pressures they might have from their organisation and their political positioning more widely, which is a very, very healthy thing to have in a democracy. what's your assessment about whether borisjohnson has lost the support of the telegraph? well, there was a period before christmas, so i think it was around a allegra stratton�*s resignation and the leak to itv news of that test, if you like, press conference when both the telegraph and the sun was studiously looking the other way, they ignored the story around that period. and i think that the difficulty for those two publications and for others that might be tempted to go down that route because they have, if you like their man in downing street, somebody that they'e become closely associated with and where there's a sort of mutually reinforcing backslapping relationship between the news publication and in this case, the prime minister, is if they end up not writing a story that everybody else can see right in front of their noses is a really important issue. it damages their credibility. the telegraph has obviously changed its tune very significantly, probably because they know that their readership is not coming from the same place that they were the other side of christmas. but i do think that if, if i mean, helen was talking about something that is corrosive of trust in journalists. if journalists actually knew about any of this before, if there were individuals that did know about some of these parties and didn't report them, i suspect that may come out in time. and that will be, you know, that's really problematic. i hope that's not the case. i sincerely hope that's not the case. but i do think thatjournalists, if they know about information that is damaging to government, they have an expectation. we all have an expectation they'll get it into the public domain. laura, just quickly as we end, i mean, does it undermine does all this undermine trust injournalists, in newspapers? i think if that were to emerge, then yes, potentially it would. i think it would raise questions about the relationships that people have with those in power, because presumably that would be the only reason anyjournalist in their right mind wouldn't pursue a story. because, as we said, regardless of who you work for, you want to get the best scoop and pound you want to you want to hold the government to account. it's about journalists working in a sense for themselves. so, yes, but i mean, i don't think that we know of any evidence of that at the moment. all these stories have come out because ofjournalists, because of really brilliant journalism everyone working together. and i'm afraid on that high note, i'm going to have to wrap you up. i'm really sorry because we are running out of time. thank you to all my guests to helen lewis, from the atlantic to jerryjones, former spokesman for theresa may. laura hughes, political correspondent at the financial times. and phil riley, chief executive of boom radio. the media show will be back at the same time next week, but for now, thanks for watching. goodbye. mostly dry but mostly cloudy weather set to stick with as for the rest of the weekend. this is the earlier satellite picture. extensive cloud pretty much across the board. some sunshine across eastern england. tonight, large areas of cloud. where there are breaks in that cloud, some mist and fog patches are likely to form. potentially a touch of frost as well. milder further north. form. potentially a touch of frost as well. milderfurther north. brisk south—westerly wind will continue to blow across south east scotland tomorrow. another cloudy day. eastern scotland doing well for sunshine. drizzle in parts of west of scotland. through the coming week we will see a lot of dry weather, especially down towards the south, the chance of some rain particularly in the north. this is bbc news. the headlines at five: police will meet a conservative mp who's accused government whips of trying to "blackmail" politicians who've tried to oust borisjohnson. the first shipment of american military aid to ukraine arrives there after talks over russia's troop build—up on the border. the un has condemned an air strike on a yemen detention centre that has killed more than 80 people. a week after tonga was devastated by a volcanic eruption and tsunami, humanitarian aid begins to reach the tens of thousands of people affected. the actor arnold schwarzenegger is involved in a multi—vehicle crash in los angeles — one person is in hospital, but it's not thought their injuries are life threatening.