It’s official: the BBC have done a shameful deal with Boris Johnson – they get the ratings, he gets his rigged election

Watching Question Time from Glasgow last night, I thought it was striking that there was no question about the attempts by ITV and Sky to rig the leaders’ election debates by excluding the SNP (and also the Liberal Democrats in ITV’s case).  It’s inconceivable that a Scottish audience wouldn’t have submitted questions about such an urgent threat to the democratic process in this country, so the producers presumably didn’t want the topic to be debated.  And now we can understand why.  The BBC have done exactly the same deal with Boris Johnson that ITV did, and given in to his demands that all major parties should be excluded apart from his own and Labour.  You can easily see what it’s in it for both sides – Boris gets his rigged election, the BBC gets bumper ratings.  So now we can look forward to three rigged debates from all three broadcasters.