There are three ways of explaining the BBC's pulling of the already-recorded Have I Got News For You from the schedules yesterday.
The least likely is Auntie's own excuse, that the appearance of Heidi Allen, former Conservative MP and now titular head of The Independent Group, egregiously broke partiality guide-lines. As Ms Allen has pointed out, Nigel Farage appeared (incidentally for the thirty-fourth time) on Question Time, which went out live on BBC-1 on the same day as HIGNFY was recorded for the same channel. If this were valid, Auntie would be admitting that viewers placed maximum faith in a satirical knockabout show and zero trust in her flagship political forum. Unfortunately, the evidence from social media and the blogosphere is that QT is still taken seriously. (I gave up watching it a long time ago. I spent a lot of money on my TV set when I was gainfully employed and I cannot afford to replace a shattered screen.)
One possibility is that it was an act of spite by the Conservative hierarchy who see Ms Allen's crossing the floor as treachery and who are able to influence the BBC behind the scenes at the top level. The fact that Ms Allen was not substituted before the recording but only after her participation became more widely known gives credence to this view.
Alternatively, the BBC top brass estimated that Ms Allen's party, which could possibly offer a threat to the Liberal Democrats in the European Parliament poll, would gain more publicity by their drastic action than if they had let her appear in her own right as scheduled.
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