Newsnight on Gideon's day of woe

The lead item on Newsnight was predictably George Osborne's troubled day concerning yachts, donations and the like. A fairly accurate VT report then turned to a debate in the studio with Paxman and a trio of MPs from the main parties.

A complete waste of time. Paxman started by asking the panel whether they would have accepted hospitality aboard a yacht and it really didn't get much better than that...

Peter Lilley consistently - and correctly - maintained that Osborne had not done anything wrong and had denied the allegations. Norman Baker took a rather pious view of the whole situation and the Labour MP - whose name escapes me - spent most of the time rather smugly pointing out that this mess was Osborne's own fault for blabbing about Peter Mandelson in the first place...

An amazing 10 or so minutes was devoted to this non-discussion about what is, in all reality, a rather thin story. Even Jeremy declared "Well let's move on because we aren't getting anywhere here"


Next up was the coverage of Mervyn King's speech in Leeds. Paul Mason filed a decent report and then there was another panel discussion with Newsnight's shadow MPC. Ken Clarke spoke almost so much that Ruth Lea had little chance of getting a word in and seemed quite frustrated at some points by this. Jeremy seemed disinterested in chairing effectively. On the whole, too little time was given to the thoughts of the panel.

Perhaps they should have cut the Osborne story and just had the facts (as currently known) of the matter and left out the ridiculous panel discussion altogether.