WHILE critics have accused the Home Office of not acting quickly enough to bring Ukrainian refugees to the UK, one Minister at least can claim to be making progress.
Grant Shapps, England’s Transport Secretary, told Times Radio yesterday he found the Ukrainian refugee family he is offering a home on Facebook.
“There were lots of people talking about it and I was asked, as lots of other people were, and we’d already been discussing it since the beginning of the outbreak of war, that if we could help then we’d really like to,” he said.
It was a rare moment of optimism across Sunday shows that otherwise took their cue from the papers in focussing on the horrifying reports coming out of Ukraine as some Russian troops retreat.
With Westminster and Holyrood now in recess for Easter there was a changing of the presenting guard on some programmes, with Clive Myrie covering for Sophie Raworth on Sunday Morning and Gary Robertson filling in for Martin Geissler on The Sunday Show.
From Kyiv rooftop to the Mastermind studio via the Six O’Clock News desk, there are few places Myrie has not appeared in recent months.
The move to Sunday Morning is not a permanent switch, with Raworth returning next Sunday. In September, Laura Kuenssberg takes over permanent occupancy of what was The Andrew Marr Show.
That still leaves the question of who replaces Kuenssberg as BBC political editor. A name had been expected last week but as of Friday evening it remained all quiet on the west London front.
According to the Sunday Times, the search for a replacement for Kuenssberg has “descended into farce”. It had been thought the job would go to an outsider, with Sophy Ridge of Sky News and Anushka Asthana, deputy political editor of ITV News, rumoured to be frontrunners.
The new name in the frame is said to be Chris Mason, presenter of Any Questions, despite previously ruling himself out of the running.
Mason has a number of factors in his favour should he change his mind. Having taken over successfully from Jonathan Dimbleby in the hotly contested race to chair the Friday night BBC Radio 4 show, the 41-year-old has shown he is comfortable with the big gigs.
He is a safe pair of hands on a live news story, as he showed last year when he joined Reeta Chakrabarti in “filling” for three hours when Boris Johnson’s Saturday night Downing Street briefing was delayed.
A prolific tweeter with 180,000 followers, Mason was also part of the “fab four”with Kuenssberg, Katya Adler, and Adam Fleming who presented Brexitcast, a podcast that was such a ratings hit it was transferred to television.
Another factor in Mason’s favour in a BBC increasingly sensitive to the charge of being too white, middle class and male is his background. Although Mason went to Cambridge he was born and brought up in Yorkshire with parents who were primary teachers, and he still has the accent to prove it.
The question is whether he would want another job move just a couple of years after taking over Any Questions. Dimbleby was in the post for 32 years.
Mason’s relatively low profile perhaps accounts for him failing to find a place in a new survey aiming to find the UK’s favourite political interviewer. Carried out by YouGov for The Times and The Sunday Times, the list reads like a who’s who of broadcasters down the years.
Eddie Mair, ex-BBC now LBC, is in 10th position, tied with Sophie Raworth and the late, legendary Brian Walden of London Weekend Television.
Next, also tied, are Robert Peston, Jeremy Vine, and John Humphrys. Ahead of them is Jonathan Dimbleby in fourth place, Andrew Neil third, and David Frost second.
Number one? That man Andrew Marr, with 18% of those polled naming him as their number one choice for heated debate on a Sunday morning. Marr can now be found at LBC on weekdays.
Further down the list but only four spots from Mair is former BBC Scotland Editor, Sarah Smith. Now the corporation’s North America editor, Smith polled ahead of Peter Jay, Matthew Parris, Adam Boulton, and Steve Richards.
Broken down by party allegiance, Conservative voters preferred Andrew Neil to Andrew Marr (19% and 15% respectively).
The positions were reversed among Labour voters, with 20% backing Marr and just 4% favouring Neil.
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