Last night, the BBC’s Newsnight programme, as you’d expect, featured analysis of Philip Hammond’s Budget speech. It also purported to feature a clip of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s response.

But it didn’t.

Below on the left is a still taken from Jeremy Corbyn’s response – as he laid into a heckling Tory whip trying to divert attention from the plight of sick and disabled people under the Tory government. On the right is a still taken from the Newsnight coverage.

Can you spot the differences?

Different ties, different people behind him, even different glasses. The clip the BBC showed has Sarah Champion on the front bench behind Corbyn. She is no longer a front-bencher. In the real footage, Dawn Butler is directly behind him. The Tories around Hammond in the Corbyn clip are a completely different set from those in the clip shown by Newsnight of Hammond’s Budget speech, too.

The clip Newsnight showed was of Corbyn speaking well enough, but it was the Corbyn of March 2017, not the post-GE Corbyn – fluent, confident and owning the room in the way that he has done consistently since the supposedly ‘shock’ General Election result and the polling lead he has achieved over the Tories since:

The Corbyn speaking yesterday owned the Chamber – and the Tories:

The anomaly was spotted by a friend of Twitter user Helen Cherry, who tweeted about it. That tweet was flagged to the SKWAWKBOX by a follower – an example of the co-operative way that the new left media phenomenon works and worries the Establishment.

Was this just an error? If so, it was an enormous one – to take completely the wrong speech and put it out to millions as one that took place yesterday. The video Newsnight showed wasn’t even from last year’s Budget response, as Corbyn wore a red tie to that, too, so it’s not like someone looked in the Budget Response folder and pasted in the wrong file.

Or did someone at Newsnight want a different Corbyn on show to viewers?

Whether deliberate or inadvertent, the BBC and others throw ‘fake news’ smears at the independent media yet showed what amounted to fake news on one of its flagship politics and current affairs programmes.

Newsnight has been contacted for comment.

Edit: Newsnight has now been forced to issue a public correction – see here.

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