Vincent Hanna - Work For The BBC

Work For The BBC

In 1973, he was recruited by the BBC Current Affairs department to work on the television series Panorama. According to those who worked with him, he was extremely nervous when starting out, but he managed to master the medium. His greatest fame came from his BBC Newsnight coverage of by-elections from 1980 onward. His first campaign was spent doggedly pursuing candidates with difficult questions. Very few escaped unscathed. At Darlington in March 1983, Hanna's broadcasts helped to destroy the campaign of SDP candidate Tony Cook, who had been the early favourite to win.

In 1984, Hanna's impartiality came into question when he failed to disguise his support for tactical voting in some reports on the Chesterfield by-election of that year. The Labour candidate, Tony Benn, accused him of acting as the SDP candidate. During the Greenwich by-election of February 1987, he publicly accused Angela Rumbold, a Conservative Minister, of being a liar. Rumbold had cross-examined him over the alleged impartiality of a public opinion poll which showed the SDP candidate closing on the Labour candidate. On the day of the June 1987 general election, Hanna informed the Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, of the early results of the BBC exit poll that showed the Labour party doing surprisingly well, and hinted to Kinnock that he might find himself in government. The poll proved wholly inaccurate, and Kinnock's party lost the election.