Jane Martinson, The Guardian.
The legal action has made news and it will do damage. A potential disaster for the corporation and the UK, but a good day’s work for this president.
Love Actually may be a terrible movie, but it provides one speech that’s hard not to wish into reality this Christmas. Keir Starmer, the actual, nonfictional UK prime minister, needs to channel the one played by Hugh Grant – and stand up to an absurd US president now bullying the BBC with a $10bn lawsuit.
Just imagine for one moment that Starmer decided to make Donald Trump’s claim against the BBC the final straw for a special relationship that is increasingly special only in a bad way. That would not be outlandish, for not only has Trump taken aim against a British broadcaster, but earlier this week it seemed that his promise of an AI “prosperity deal” (bought, let’s not forget, with gurning invites to Windsor Castle) is set to evaporate. As the fictional Love Actually PM once said: “A friend who bullies us is no longer a friend … Since bullies only respond to strength, from now onward I will be prepared to be much stronger.”
Others see this for what it is. Starmer’s own health minister, Stephen Kinnock, as well as rivals such as Ed Davey, are already among those urging him to make a stand. But in their heart of hearts they must know that, here in the real world, the chances of Starmer calling Trump a bullying narcissist – who uses lawsuits and threats at a time when the BBC is already under immense pressure and now facing a charter review – and all to divert attention away from his own failings, is less likely to happen than Hugh Grant standing for office.
So it now remains to ask how on earth the BBC is going to fight his wildly inappropriate case. So far, its instincts are sound: it says it will fight and in the first instance – on a variety of legal and factual grounds – will seek to have the case dismissed, before the portentous costs spiral.
And that must be right, for anyone struggling with the appropriateness or otherwise of this should firstly remember that this is a US president suing a news organisation paid for by all British citizens, over mistakes made in a 12-second clip not actually available in Florida, where he decided to file his 33-page complaint.
It’s hard even to see what the lawsuit’s jurisdictional basis is, given the fact that the BBC has no right to show or distribute its content in the US. Trump’s suit could try to use the possibility of the show being seen on the video-on-demand streaming service BritBox, although experts have already pretty much demolished that line of argument. Lawyers are likely to have a lucrative field day arguing about whether or not Floridians would need a VPN to do this.
Trump has also claimed that the BBC inflicted “extensive reputational harm” as well as “overwhelming reputational and financial harm” with the dodgy documentary. Yet he went on to win the US election a week after the Panorama programme was first aired, while his share of the vote in Florida increased.
More bizarrely, his speech may have been badly spliced by the BBC editors, but the fact remains that Trump was indicted by a US grand jury on four charges for his conduct over the Capitol attack, the subject of the Panorama programme. Even the lawsuit cannot claim that he never said the words in the video, just “this sequence of words”.
Most normal politicians would not want to remind anyone of this episode, but, of course, Trump is no normal politician. His frequent wild statements – most recently suggesting the acclaimed director Rob Reiner hastened his own death with his criticism of Trump – may do nothing to improve the lives of ordinary Americans, but they both entertain them and distract a news media flailing in the torrent of online slurry.
For the BBC, it’s a lose-lose situation. As Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of the Trump-supporting US network Newsmax, said on the Today programme, the case is likely to cost between $50m and $100m to fight, not least because of the burden of discovery prompted by Trump’s lawyers demanding access to every email that mentions him in a bid to find bias. Suggesting a figure of about $10m, Ruddy urged the BBC to settle, like so many US news organisations including ABC and CBS News have already done, in response to this year’s threat. But how can the BBC settle when the case is, by most reasonable measures, absurd?
This first reality TV president seems determined to make the world an absurdist farce. Yet the reality is a tragedy for those dependent on fearless, independent news organisations trying to hold the most powerful to account. It doesn’t have to make sense; it just has to make news and do damage. On those grounds, the president already has everything he wants.
