LONDON — Outgoing boss of Sky News John Ryley has called for more transparency in the U.K. House of Commons chamber and argued cameras should be introduced into voting lobbies for the first time.
The media boss, who is departing Sky after 17 years in charge later this spring, told POLITICO’s Westminster Insider podcast that the rules governing filming inside parliament are “old fashioned” and in need of review.
He also called for a “serious discussion” about televising lobby briefings, the secretive Downing Street sessions where selected journalists grill the prime minister’s spokesperson on a daily basis.
“Those rules need loosening,” Ryley said. “We need to see far more about what goes on in the House of Commons chamber. And I’m all for a discussion with the [Commons] speaker about how we might go about that.”
Parliamentary proceedings have been televised since 1989, and there are strict rules about what can and cannot be shown.
There are currently 10 fixed cameras within the chamber, all operated by the parliament’s own broadcasting team. The feed from the chamber will only ever show the MP speaking, or the MP they are speaking about.
“Like all things, there should be evolution rather than sudden change,” Ryley said. “But [the rules] are a bit old-fashioned.”
Ryley pointed to the fracking vote in September during the final days of Liz Truss’ regime as proof that cameras should be installed in voting lobbies.
“It was an extraordinary night of turmoil,” he said. “[There] were clearly kerfuffles in the voting lobbies — we saw none of that.”
He added: “It’s not for the broadcasters to dictate … There should be a reasonable dialogue between the two groups and evolve towards a solution that is in the interests of improving democracy.”
The director of parliamentary broadcasting, John Angeli, told the podcast that any decision to televise the voting lobbies would be for MPs alone to decide.
New kids on the block
Elsewhere in the interview, Ryley took a swipe at start-up broadcasters Talk TV and GB News.
Asked if he still cared about traditional TV viewing figures — after TalkTV host Piers Morgan suggested they were less relevant than online clips and coverage — Ryley said: “Yes. I mean, the TV news channel here generates significant revenue for Sky News, and it would be very foolish to ignore that. Indeed that’s quite a convenient argument for my friends at TalkTV, whose viewership isn’t on the scale of ours.”
Ryley added that he did not see either Talk TV or GB News as real news channels at all.
“I don’t see them really as news channels,” he said. “They don’t break news. They don’t cover breaking news stories in the way that we do. And they don’t have journalists who can break the stories like we do.”
TalkTV declined to comment.
