Credit;PA
Kay Burley’s decision to “empty chair” James Cleverly will not lead to a formal investigation after Ofcom assessed the whole programme.
The media watchdog received 271 complaints over the Sky News presenter’s actions.
Burley claimed the Conservative Party chairman missed a planned appearance on her breakfast show, although the Tory MP responded that he was not due to appear.
Burley addressed a vacant seat with planned questions for the Tory politician.
The “fuming” news host “empty-chaired” the Conservative Party chairman and ran through a list of election campaign scandals, U-turns, embarrassments and inadequacies that she had been hoping to grill him on while “he is probably 15 feet from where I am standing”.
The list included:
“Where on earth is he? He is 15 feet away from me, James Cleverly, who is the chair of the Conservative Party,” snapped the Sky News presenter infuriated by the Tory Party chairman hiding from her.
“And he says he will not come on this programme to answer all of those allegations”.
But after assessing whether the two-hour programme breached rules on due impartiality, an Ofcom spokeswoman said: “We assessed complaints about the presenter’s treatment of the Conservative Party chairman.
“Having assessed the programme as a whole, we were satisfied that the viewpoint of the Conservatives was given sufficient weight to maintain due impartiality.
“This included a repeated clip of James Cleverly discussing his party’s ambitions for the election campaign.”
Mr Cleverly denied that he had been due to attend, saying: “I like to think I’m a pretty decent multitasker, but I cannot physically be in two places at the same time.”
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