The BBC fawns over Sturgeon because it knows nothing about Scotland

The BBC must institute a dramatic overhaul of its attitude towards Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP now that Scotland’s First Minister has thrown her troops into another referendum battle to break up Britain. She can’t be permitted to get away again with the easy ride she enjoyed yesterday at the hands of Martha Kearney on the Today programme.

There’s no certainty that there will be another referendum but with Ms Sturgeon’s officials – all members of the British civil service, remember – preparing the ground for such a vote, she must now be treated as a frontline British politician, with all the attendant ferocious scrutiny of her views, policies and record. With locally based BBC Scotland long since sadly cowed by the SNP, too many broadcasters appear to regard Ms Sturgeon and her team as foreign potentates, to be treated with a diplomatic, almost fawning, deference.

I don’t expect London-based broadcasters to be as obsessed with Scotland’s constitutional future as I am, nor do I expect them to share my perpetual and jaundiced view of independence. But impartiality on their part doesn’t mean they’ve got to allow the SNP to escape the “why are you lying to me?” treatment they dish out to other politicians.

I agreed with ITV’S Robert Peston who told Radio 4 yesterday that he believed that an impartial journalist’s job was to assess the evidence they are presented with and say what they reckon to be true. They must use the same criteria in dealing with Ms Sturgeon.

A normally combative politician, brought up in a pretty hard school, I’ll bet Ms Sturgeon couldn’t believe her luck at the relaxed interview she had with Ms Kearney yesterday. With her spring conference opening in Edinburgh this morning, the First Minister was allowed to waft away questions about the troubles in her party and government – such as the fact that no opinion poll backs independence, and the falling standards in Scottish schools. Incredibly, she wasn’t even asked about the dispute in her party about which currency an independent Scotland might use – the issue that will dominate her conference and which was a factor in the SNP losing the last referendum.

Ms Kearney is hardly the toughest of political interviewers at the best of times, but the main problem yesterday appeared to be a woeful lack of preparation. I may be wrong, but it seemed like the sum total of Today’s background for the interview was a researcher handing her a single sheet of paper with the words “All You Need to Know About Scottish Politics” written across the top of it. That’s no way to treat the future of the UK, which is, in my opinion, an issue more important than Brexit.

Ms Sturgeon won’t like being fiercely challenged, however much it’s deserved. After all, Alex Salmond called in the Nat mobs to march on the BBC’S Glasgow HQ to denounce Nick Robinson’s BBC reports five years ago.