The BBC has played down the significance of a row with Conservatives after George Osborne accused it of “hyperbolic coverage” of government spending cuts during a Today programme interview.
John Humphrys, the Today presenter who interviewed Osborne on Thursday morning for the Radio 4 programme, later told the Guardian the the comments by a BBC colleague that the chancellor was criticising were “obviously a joke”.
Humphrys added: “But politicians tend to lose their sense of humour the closer it gets to a general election.”
The chancellor was apparently angry about an earlier Today interview between Humphrys and Norman Smith, during which BBC assistant political editor Smith said of the Office for Budget Responsibility’s report: “When you sit down and read the OBR report it reads like a book of doom. It is utterly terrifying.”
Smith said that public spending would “have to be hacked back to the levels of the 1930s in terms of as a proportion of GDP and that is an extraordinary concept”.
He added: “You’re back to the land of The Road to Wigan Pier,” a reference to George Orwell’s bleak 1930s book of poverty in the north of England.
This prompted Osborne to tell Humphrys that when he listened to Smith’s comments it was like “listening to a rewind of a tape of 2010 with BBC correspondents saying Britain is returning to a sort of George Orwell world”, which was “such nonsense”.
“I would have thought the BBC would have learnt from the last four years that its totally hyperbolic coverage of spending cuts has not been matched by what has actually happened,” Osborne said. “What I reject is the totally hyperbolic BBC coverage on spending cuts. I had all that when I was interviewed four years ago, and has the world fallen in? No, it has not.”
It is understood that no one from the government’s communications team contacted the Today production team directly about Smith’s comments, although in the daily briefing with lobby journalists later in the morning a spokesman for the prime minister said David Cameron agreed with Osborne’s comments.
A BBC spokesperson said: “We’re satisfied our coverage and analysis has been fair and balanced, and we gave the chancellor plenty of opportunity to respond on the programme. We will continue to ask ministers the questions our audience want answered.”
The government’s director of communications, Craig Oliver, has previously had an argument with Smith outside No 10 Downing Street in 2012 that was captured on camera, in which he accused Smith of bias over coverage of the Leveson inquiry into press ethics.
In December 2012 Oliver texted several BBC News executives to complain about a Today interview between Osborne and Evan Davis, then a presenter on the Radio 4 show, about his autumn statement that year.
Oliver was understood to have been called back by an unnamed BBC executive who acknowledged that the interview “could have been better handled”, after he complained about Davis’s repeated interruptions. The BBC said that it had responded informally to Oliver, that it had “reviewed the interview” and that there was “no question of any kind of reprimand” for Davis.
Davis, responding to a suggestion from Tom Newton Dunn, the Sun’s political editor, that he had been “told off”, tweeted that was not the case: “There is some confusion around just now, but just to clarify: I have not been told off for the way I interviewed the chancellor today.”
• This article was amended on Friday 5 December 2014, to clarify that John Humphrys was referring to his BBC colleague Norman Smith’s comments, rather than George Osborne’s criticism, when he said they were “obviously a joke”
