Andrew Neil is undervalued – the politics presenter is certainly worth more than John McEnroe In the same week that Andrew Neil has been named by MPs as their favourite broadcast journalist, he has been […]

In the same week that Andrew Neil has been named by MPs as their favourite broadcast journalist, he has been given an enhanced role by the BBC with more time on air.

Yet the BBC’s best political interviewer and host of This Week is not included on another list, published on Wednesday, containing the names of the 64 best-paid BBC presenters, which was headed by Gary Lineker on £1,750,000 and included cricket commentator Jonathan Agnew.

In these times of national and global turbulence, a political junkie like Neil would probably do his job for nothing. He has other work, including being chairman of the publisher which owns The Spectator, the right-of-centre periodical.

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In a Comres poll of MPs and their attitudes to media, Neil was the clear winner in the broadcast journalist popularity stakes, with 21 per cent of votes, ahead of BBC colleague Laura Kuenssberg (17 per cent). Veteran political interviewer John Humphrys scored two per cent.

Andrew Neil has overcome criticism about a potential right-wing stance

Kuennsberg was given a bodyguard at last year’s Labour Party conference but her appeal within Parliament isn’t partisan (she is easily the most popular broadcaster among Labour MPs but resonates with many Tories too).

Neil’s Westminster fan club is blue-tinted (36 per cent of Tories and five per cent of Labour MPs picked him).

His connections to the right-wing press mean that the former Sunday Times editor often faces online sniping over his own leanings, but the respect he has among MPs is testimony to his grasp of British politics. As an unflinching interviewer who is always well-briefed and quick to spot a weakness, he is an asset to the BBC.

It is 15 years since the BBC put Neil at the heart of its political output following a review ordered by former Director-General Greg Dyke. Having cut his broadcasting teeth on radio, he confounded old media rivals with his easy adaptation to television, combining humour with insight in his confident stewardship of BBC1’s This Week and BBC2’s The Daily Politics, which both launched in 2003.

Now, after another review of the BBC’s Westminster coverage, The Daily Politics is being scrapped and replaced by a new show, Politics Live. The change is partly about money and will deliver £1.9m of £80m in required savings at BBC News, resulting in 23 job cuts and the axing of bespoke programming for BBC Parliament.

For Neil, the new format means he gets to work more closely with Kuenssberg on an enhanced Wednesday show based around Prime Minister’s Questions and lasting one hour and 45 minutes. It’s a bid to ‘own’ coverage of PMQs, which have grown in profile in the age of social media.

Indeed, Politics Live is itself an attempt to reflect the way modern audiences engage with politics, mostly via phones.

Politics in the digital age

While The Daily Politics was “quite a traditional TV format”, Politics Live will “have a life outside television,” Rob Burley, Editor of BBC Live Political Programmes, tells me. Discussions and interviews will be shot in styles that audiences are “used to seeing on mobile” and routinely distributed online. “Everything we do on film will be pushed out on social.”

The shake-up will see a new digital unit set up in the BBC newsroom to create and package political content for audiences on mobiles says Katy Searle, head of BBC Westminster. “We look at news in a completely different way to just a few years ago.”

The BBC needs innovation in political coverage because it must respond to technology-driven changes to audience behaviour.

The format for Politics Live, which starts in September and will be presented on most days by Jo Cockburn, will be “more freewheeling, more conversational” and “more in tune with the times” than its predecessor, says Burley. Today’s audiences, he says, “are less deferential”.

A key influence for the show has been MSNBC’s Morning Joe, which features diverse guests discussing current affairs issues and whose lead host Joe Scarborough has clashed with Donald Trump on Twitter.

Politics Live is also inspired by Brexitcast, the funny but serious BBC podcast presented by Kuenssberg, Europe Editor Katya Adler, Adam Fleming and Chris Mason.

The BBC needs innovation in political coverage because it must respond to technology-driven changes to audience behaviour and because it can’t be complacent.

Writing in the latest New York Review of Books, Nick Cohen accuses the BBC of being “frightened of journalism” because it hasn’t done more to use its vast resources to investigate the integrity of the Brexit vote. While it is still our most trusted news organisation, today’s BBC has critics of all hues on the political spectrum.

But I don’t think you could accuse Andrew Neil of being frightened of journalism. Nor is he bland. And from September he will be on air a little more. Even if the BBC pays its best political analyst less than its occasional tennis pundit John McEnroe.