The Daily Mail picked up from The Commentator and UKIPIAN the case of Amy Rutland, the Labour Party official who fulminated against Eastleigh UKIP candidate Diane James on last week’s BBC Question Time (James, you might recall, very nearly snatched victory from the Liberal Democrats)
The question was about the impact that UKIP might have on the Tories future electoral hopes.
the camera swung to Amy Rutland, who launched a personal attack on the UKIP panellist, the Eastleigh candidate Diane James, calling her ‘disgusting’.
Miss Rutland, a politics graduate, claimed UKIP preyed on vulnerable people by ‘scaremongering’ about the number of Romanians and Bulgarians expected to come to Britain.
fortunately Diane James remained unhassled and dealt with her in a calm and effective manner – and there it would have ended if some salient facts about Amy Rutland had not emerged over the next few days.
Rutland is South-East Policy Co-ordinator for the Labour Party
She was very active in the Eastleigh by election
Although identified by Stephen Twigg, the Labour MP on the QT panel, merely as “a questioner from the audience” she had been with him at a meeting earlier in the day
Now in itself there is no reason why a political activist should not be present in the QT audience. But there is considerable suspicion that the BBC was aware of her presence and that the chairman, the millionaire David Dimbleby, not only picked her out but then kept her in the spotlight by highlighting her remarks and pressuring Diane James to react rather than answer the original question
I suspect that Dimbleby and the producers choreographed the whole scene hoping to unsettle UKIP’s Diane James (who had impressed the media at Eastleigh) and to undermine UKIP’s policy stance on immigration.
Unfortunately it has backfired on them. Rutland has gone underground and the Beeb is backpedalling furiously.
But never mind – it was all paid for out of our pockets via the BBC Poll Tax (and it’s likely that £450,000 goes each year to David Dimbleby)
