Channel 4’s Dispatches will tonight air extracts from a conversation between current London mayor Boris Johnson and Old Etonian friend Darius Guppy from 1990 in which the pair discuss beating up a journalist – then News of the World reporter Stuart Collier.
In an Independent.co.uk interview in January 2007, Johnson said he had offered Guppy his help in finding the journalist because Guppy had told him ‘that some tabloid scuzzbags had reduced his family to tears’.
Listen to excerpts from the conversation at this link.
According to a statement on the Dispatches website, a spokesman for Boris Johnson said: “This was a colourful story from almost two decades ago. It was of little or no consequence back then – and has no relevance whatsoever now.”
As I was watching it, I thought “is it just me who sees sloppy journalism here?”. So I setup a twitter search, and people were saying “ Looks like Dispatches just said “Who hates Boris as Mayor?” and filmed the results… Who needs balanced nowadays, eh?” and “sounds more like an unjustified personal attack” and “It’s all a bit one-sided.” My girlfriend thinks Boris is great “as a person” but doesn’t like his mayoral role, but even she said it was “like a 19 year old ranting first year journalism student doing his first camera piece after writing for Socialist Worker”! Dispatches is usually very good, but to me it looks like they took the abovementioned journalist and crossed it with the kind of youtube-quality documentary you might see on Edge TV or something. Very very poor.
As the user gordonchas posted on the channel 4 forums….