Dorothy Byrne: 'More journalists should have called Boris Johnson a liar when he was Prime Minister'

​But the scrupulously fair-minded Byrne is also happy to give praise where it is due – particularly when it comes to Channel 4’s move to Leeds.

Channel 4 executives spent several years resisting Government attempts to move their headquarters out of London but were ultimately forced into accepting the change – albeit with compromises including the retention of their main building in the capital and hundreds of staff staying based there.

Leeds was ultimately chosen as the location for the new “national HQ” and Byrne, who was head of news and current affairs at Channel 4 for 15 years before taking an editor-at-large role ahead of her departure in 2021, says the decision has proved to be the correct one.

In a lecture at the University of Leeds on the relationship between politicians and the media, she said: “Where politicians have definitely got it right is in their drive for the BBC and Channel 4 to move more journalists to the north of England.”

Byrne says several “terrific” current affairs programmes have been commissioned from Leeds, while she is “delighted” at the opening of a Channel 4 news studio in the city and the mandate given to a Leeds-based team to focus on investigations, social affairs and data journalism.

But speaking to The Yorkshire Post just before the lecture last week, Byrne expresses her hope that Channel 4 could go even further with its commitment to the North.

Byrne was born in Scotland, grew up near Blackpool and at the beginning of her career worked in Manchester for Granada Television.

“I know Channel 4 has lots of financial pressures so I’m not saying I call for Channel 4 to move to Leeds tomorrow or next year or in five years but I would like to see the majority of Channel 4 teams based in Leeds,” she says.

“I believe the reason Granada TV was so brilliant was the majority of people were based in Manchester.

“I believe that the north of England deserves a television channel based in the north of England. If we are really serious about making the North equal in importance to the South, it needs more major institutions to be based in the North.

“I know from having worked at Granada in its heyday that being based in the north of England means you gain perspectives that you do not gain in the south of England. I believe you get stories you would never get otherwise, and you discover talent you would never discover otherwise.

“I think there’s a strong argument that if far more journalists had been based in the north of England at the time of the debate about Brexit, so many journalists would not have called Brexit wrong. A key reason they called Brexit wrong was they didn’t sufficiently understand people living in the north of England and how disaffected and marginalised they felt.”

Byrne is not just commenting from the sidelines when it comes to her passion for giving Northern voices greater prominence in the national conversation.

In her current role as president of Murray Edwards College at the University of Cambridge, she is determined to encourage more young people from the North to put in applications.

“I went to Manchester and Sheffield. They deliberately approached me because I hadn’t been to Cambridge and they want to change,” she adds.

“They have already changed a lot and want to change more and in particular they really want more people from the north of England to apply for Cambridge.”

While that academic effort is a major focus, Byrne remains passionate about the importance of journalism and its role in speaking truth to power.

In 2019, she made waves at the Edinburgh television festival’s MacTaggart Lecture – a key moment in the British TV industry calendar – by using the platform to describe then-PM Boris Johnson as a “known liar”.

She says she absolutely stands by the remarks – and admits to partially enjoying some of the fallout.

“If you are the head of news at Channel 4, right-wing journalists attack you all the time. But actually, two newspapers, The Sun and Daily Mail, devoted an editorial just to attacking me. And I actually felt that was one of the high points of my life,” she adds with a laugh.

“Boris Johnson lost his first job as a journalist for lying and he lost his last job as Prime Minister for lying. There’s a bit of a pattern of behaviour there. Boris Johnson can’t deny he is a known liar. People said I shouldn’t have said it but I’m supposed to speak truth to power and tell the truth. It was simply the truth. The reason I said it was when a known liar becomes Prime Minister, we are in new territory as broadcast journalists.

“I believe that during Boris Johnson’s premiership there were moments when broadcast journalists should have said ‘The Prime Minister just said ‘x’, that is a lie’. If they didn’t want to use the ‘lie’ word, they could have said ‘that is untrue’ or ‘that is not the case’. In the end, it was Conservative MPs who called Boris Johnson out as a liar. I think broadcasters let the public down by not calling him a liar on several occasions during his premiership.

“No right-wing journalist denied it was true that Boris Johnson was a known liar, what their newspapers said was I shouldn’t have said it. Get your head around that.”

Byrne says she is concerned about the future of public service journalism following the recent attempt to privatise Channel 4 and the Government’s intention to scrap the licence fee in 2027 without any public detail yet on how it will be replaced.

She fears the country could go down the path of the politically driven news coverage seen in America, where she believes the January 6 insurrection attempt was fuelled by channels like Fox News repeating Donald Trump’s “ludicrous” claims about the election being stolen.

“Politicians need to remind themselves that broadcast television and radio journalists are absolutely key to our democracy and should not be undermining them.

“They can criticise them, they can call them to account, they can complain about them but they should not be undermining the very existence of public service broadcasters and our brilliant system of television regulation. In America, we have seen what happens when television journalists spout the lies of bad politicians.

“We shouldn’t be complacent because I bet Americans were complacent and thought nothing could shake their democracy. Politicians should be careful to criticise us and complain about us fairly but to let us do our jobs.”

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