Team Boris threatens to ban Tory ministers from BBC’s Today programme

It’s the BBC‘s flagship radio news show and politicians normally queue up to get on.

But Government Ministers could be banned from appearing on Radio 4’s Today programme – on the orders of No 10.

The Mail on Sunday has learnt that new Downing Street Director of Communications Lee Cain has told staff he considers the show a ‘total waste of time’.

He has told his army of Whitehall spin doctors and special advisers to ignore it – and to refuse to put up Ministers to appear on it.

His strategy has been backed by Downing Street enforcer and Vote Leave mastermind Dominic Cummings who told a No 10 staff meeting last week: ‘I never listened to the Today programme for the entire year of the referendum and I intend to repeat this while I am here.’

And he urged colleagues to avoid the programme too, ‘unless they change format and actually start exploring serious subjects in a serious way’.

Relations between Downing Street and the early morning news show are at historic lows not seen since the days of Tony Blair’s ‘dodgy dossier’ and the Hutton Inquiry in 2003.

During Mr Johnson’s successful campaign for No 10 the Today programme was notably snubbed by him, as was the BBC’s heavyweight Sunday morning Andrew Marr Show. 

Mr Johnson’s only major interviews during the campaign were on TV with the Corporation’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg and Sky News’s political host Sophy Ridge. 

His only major radio interview was on Today’s Radio 4 rival The World At One – a decision that infuriated BBC executives.

The Today programme has been no stranger to political controversies for more than 30 years.

Ministers appeared regularly in the 1980s after it emerged that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was a regular listener who would even occasionally call in.

Former presenter Brian Redhead was often seen as being on the Left, prompting the then-Chancellor Nigel Lawson to accuse him of having been a Labour voter all his life during an infamous 1987 Budget interview.

In 2002 the programme faced accusations of Left-wing bias again from the Tories after editor Rod Liddle resigned for writing a critical article for The Guardian newspaper about the Countryside Alliance.

A year later Tony Blair’s New Labour administration attacked the programme after Today broadcast a report on the Iraq War by its correspondent Andrew Gilligan.

The report claimed that the Government had published a ‘dodgy’ dossier to convince the British public of the need to invade Iraq, knowing that it was deliberately exaggerated.

Biological weapons expert Dr David Kelly was Mr Gilligan’s anonymous source for this claim.

In the ensuing furore, Dr Kelly took his own life, prompting the Hutton Inquiry and the resignation of the BBC’s chairman Gavyn Davies, its director-general Greg Dyke, and Mr Gilligan. 

Ironically Mr Gilligan has now joined Mr Johnson’s Downing Street administration as a special adviser.

Veteran Today presenter John Humphrys found himself under fire in 2006 over ‘excessive’ interruptions while interviewing Conservative leader David Cameron, which prompted more than 200 complaints.

In November 2018, Today hit the headlines yet again after a Conservative Party spokesman described the show’s coverage of Philip Hammond’s final Budget as ‘the most biased BBC bulletin in history’.