Reform UK has announced it will stop cooperating with the BBC on a documentary about the party in the wake of the furore over how a speech by President Trump was edited. The Rise of Reform was due to be presented by Laura Kuenssberg and broadcast in January but an internal party email states “trust has been lost”.
The BBC commissioned October films to make the documentary. The company had worked on the Panorama programme about Mr Trump which has caused international controversy and raised the prospect of the President hitting the broadcaster with a $1billion lawsuit.
October was not responsible for the editing of the speech – which brought together two sections delivered nearly an hour apart – which was carried out by BBC staff.
The President had told the crowd in Washington DC on January 6 they would “walk down to the Capitol” and “cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women”. But the edited version showed him President saying: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol… and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
The Reform memo which went to party officials states the production company had been granted “an unprecedented level of access to our councils, councillors and elected officials”.
But it adds: “It has since come to light that this production company were the same company that were involved in making the Panorama documentary which spliced clips of President Donald Trump to suggest that he incited riots in the US.”
It adds: “We want to be clear that October Films have always conducted themselves professionally, and there is no suggestion from our side that they would maliciously misrepresent Reform UK. However, following the Panorama documentary the trust has been lost, and both BBC and the production company will have to do a lot of hard work to regain that trust.”
BBC director-general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness have resigned following the emergence of a memo by an adviser to the BBC’s editorial standards committee which accused Panorama of presenting a “distortion of the day’s events”.
The BBC declined to comment on Reform’s decision.