 Kay Burley, Sky News' most high-profile presenter is the latest public figure who's been caught breaking COVID rules. So it was revealed earlier in the week that last Saturday, Burley celebrated her birthday by breaking the rules on free occasions. So first, by meeting with multiple households in a restaurant, then by meeting multiple households in a club, and then at someone's house. Now, on Thursday, it was announced that because of her breaches of COVID rules, Burley will be taken off air for six months. Quite a serious punishment, actually. It's unclear whether she'll be paid during that period. There were two other colleagues who were also in attendance, political editor Beth Rigby and North of England correspondent Inzamam Rashid, who have been taken off air for three months, I suppose, because it wasn't their party. They've had a slightly lower punishment. Let's go through what actually happened. And we're going to talk about the morality of this. Was it right that they've been taken off six months? What were they thinking? The best way to go into this story is, I'm afraid, via Guido Forks. They broke the story. They're right-wing gossip columnists. But that does mean, not coincidentally, I think that they're very well connected in Westminster. How do you get very well connected in Westminster? You become right-wing gossip columnists. They're right. Lots of fun was had in Soho's swanky century club on Saturday night, where a star-studied group of 10 gathered to celebrate glamorous Kay Burley's upcoming 60th birthday. Guido refuses to believe she has a day over 49. The glitzy group, including on-screen talent Beth Rigby and Inzamam Rashid and Sam Washington, spanned across two tables in the Discrete Club, one table of six and one of four. When the curfew curtain fell on Frivolities at the Century Club, a smaller group went on to the in-demand Soho restaurant Foley, whose fashionable and handsome owner Guillem de Poir had appeared on Kay's sky show earlier in the week. Finally, four of the original party wound up at Kay's West London home, including a Guido, as Guido understands, Sky Reporter Inzamam Rashid and former Sky News employee Paul Harrison now working for Huawei. Now, you can see here there are three clear breaches of the rules. We can go through them one by one. Now, this all matters. These are breaches of the rules because London is subject to tier two COVID restrictions. It was subject to tier two COVID restrictions at the time of this event. Now, in tier two COVID restrictions, you can eat inside a restaurant, but not with people outside of your own household. So in tier two, the rules are that you can only meet people outside your household socially. Work is different socially if you're outside. If you're inside, you're breaking the rule, you're in your support bubble, and that can only be one person who lives in a single household. So that clearly wasn't the case here. Now, on this night out, that rule was broken first in the restaurant because there was more than one household, then in the club because there was more than one household, and then in the West London home because there was more than one household. Now, you can decide for yourself if you think this is outrageous, or if you think, you know, everyone's breaking the rules these days, Kay Burley's just doing what everyone else is doing. But what I think is slightly odd about this, and again, I'm not really here to moralize about this, what I think is surprising about this is what they were, you know, how did they think they were going to get away with this? These people are quite famous. So Kay Burley, very famous, and Befric be very famous, and people know they don't live together, right? So they went for a meal out in central London, and they didn't think they'd get called out on it. Very bizarre. Now, potentially, the reason is because these top news hosts, these top political reporters, didn't know the rules. So Kay Burley tweeted in response to this story breaking on Monday. She tweeted this, Evening everyone, I want to apologize to you all for an error of judgment. On Saturday night, I was enjoying my 60th birthday at a COVID compliant restaurant. I'm embarrassed to say that later in the evening, I inadvertently broke the rules. I had been waiting for a taxi at 11 p.m. to get home. Desperate for the loo, I briefly popped into another restaurant to spend a penny. I can only apologize. Now, this is really weird, right? It's really weird because she doesn't seem to understand remotely what the tier two COVID rules are. So for one, a COVID secure restaurant, yes, for one, I don't think any restaurants are really COVID secure. But that's another issue. But if you're in a COVID secure restaurant, you have to be eating with people in your own household. And you would have thought she probably should have known that soon as she's grilling government politicians every morning, right? You'd also have thought, given she was out with Beth Rigby, whose job it literally is to question the politicians at those Downing Street press conference would have known that. The second one, what I think is weirder though, is why does she think that going into a restaurant to pee was the rule break? I mean, nowhere in the rules does it say you're allowed to go into one restaurant but not two restaurants. It says what the rules are concerned with is how many people you go into the restaurant with. So I can't possibly see how she thought that the reason she'd broken the rule was because she peed in a restaurant. It doesn't make any sense to me. Anyway, by last night she understood the COVID restrictions. That's why she's agreed to step back for six months, but she's still sort of claiming ignorance as her excuse fundamentally. Let's get up her statement from yesterday, from Thursday. I have today agreed with Sky News to step back from my broadcasting role for a period of reflection. It's clear to me that we are all in the fight against COVID-19 and that we all have a duty to stick firmly by the rules. It doesn't matter that I thought it was COVID-compliant on a recent social event. The fact is I was wrong. I made a big mistake and I am sorry. Some dear friends and colleagues, some of the most talented and committed professionals in our business have been pulled into this episode and I regret this enormously. I was one of the founding presenters on Sky News. No one is proud of our channel's reputation and the professionals on our team and the impact that we make. She's very looking forward to working for Sky News in the future. She's still working for them. She's just not on air. And especially since what Dominic Cummings did, I know that many people are breaking those rules at the moment. I think a birthday meal with 10 people, I don't think many people have broken the rules to that extent, but I think people going to the pub with someone outside of their house, I think a lot of people are doing that right now. But what's bizarre to me is yet that you've got the political editor of Sky News. You've got their most high-profile presenter who's most responsible for interviewing the government ministers. That's Kay Burley, the north of England correspondent who should understand the tier system because they've had the tier system up there. It's been very controversial in the north of England. And none of them understood the rules. You know, we know that households are like pantry dishes and I know that it is getting very... And I also think it is absolutely mad that they didn't think that this would backfire. No one gives a shit about who I am and what I do, but I'm still really careful. Primarily I'm careful because I have two parents working in frontline healthcare who are in their mid-to-late 60s and I'm scared shitless about the scale of infections. But also because I'm just like, I don't want anyone to see me and think that I'm careless about things like that. But I do get that it is getting tier system. I understand that we've been doing this for a really long time and it feels, for some reason, the rules feel a little bit more bendable now than they did to begin with. But unfortunately, I think it's still really important. And I still think that the fact that we can eat inside restaurants when there are 500 people dying a day, I don't think that makes sense. It's a personal opinion. I think that that is really irresponsible. And I come from that position as well as someone who, again, like I have parents, I'm genuinely who are kind of in that front line. And the snitchery of the story does go against my core instincts. But now that it's out there, I think that it was important that she was publicly kind of reprimanded for that because when Dominic Cummings wasn't, that was, I think, a huge turning point in compliance because as I sort of mentioned before, the ability to carry out these public health measures and the ability to keep the infections low through these measures is not going to be from arresting or finding every single person that breaks the rules. It takes the public buying into and finding reasons of being compelled to voluntarily comply. And part of that has to be that people in the public eye are kind of responsible for not kind of doing those public breaches. Maybe I'm a little bit more conservative on this than you are. And I really do think like, please don't drink inside pubs with people that aren't in your household like just coming from my own perspective. But yeah, I think that this was probably just about the right level of punishment. I think firing her might be a little bit too far. But yeah, I do generally agree that these things have to be taken really, really seriously and that this laxness does not come from an objective reality. It doesn't come from this idea that the vaccine is less lethal or that we don't have as many people dying or that the transmission isn't as high. It comes from a kind of loss of public faith and loss of the public buying into why we need to do this. And that's actually ironically partly the fault of the fact that the media is not reporting the number of cases anymore. It makes people feel that it has gone away. But for those of us with family members and friends who are in the thick of this, it absolutely has not gone away. So yeah, it sucks for her but that's just how it's got to be. I think that's all very much fair enough. I suppose to clarify, I do think that absolutely the vaccine is not here. People 100% should be taking the rules seriously and they should be taking more fundamentally actually than the rules I think is being sensible. Even if something is allowed, maybe don't do it if it's really risky. I think sometimes we sort of approach this from an interesting way in this country which is all about what's in the letter of the laws and not actually the general principle is don't hang out with lots of people in an enclosed space and that's why I think I agree with you on restaurants to be honest because the government have made this big deal out of you can only eat in a restaurant with people from your own household which I think most people understand the government kind of knew wouldn't happen because otherwise the restaurants wouldn't do very well because most people eat out with someone not from their own household. Otherwise you get a takeaway. But you can also catch COVID if you're not sitting on the same table as someone. This is an airborne disease. It doesn't really care if you're sitting on the same table as someone or if you're sitting on the next table to them. I was reading an article that South Korean scientists had properly looked at the history of all the different transmissions of COVID-19 and they'd understood that people can catch COVID-19 when they're six meters away from people for 15 minutes in a restaurant. So the fact that they're open at all is pretty bizarre. We're going to go on to some more beef within Skye in a moment. First of all, if you're enjoying this show, do subscribe to the channel. As you know, we go live every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7pm and we put out content every day. So the way to get notified about it is to hit that button. I told you more beef within Skye News. Adam Bolton, so he's probably along with Kay Burley, the most high-profile Skye presenter. He's also been there from the start, also the editor at large. And he, before Kay Burley was taken off air for six months, or she was taken on air actually from this incident, but before it was announced it would be six months before that was decided. People sort of, I think, guessed that this wasn't going to go very well for Kay Burley, when Adam Bolton tweeted this, or retweeted, sorry. So he retweeted someone called John Law, who's got the hashtag Sky News, Kay Burley, John Law has tweeted, look at the state of Sky News. The morons spent all summer preaching to us. And now look at them. After illegally going on a bender, they were going to a hospital to put lives at risk. Maybe one of them was going to report in the hospital afterwards. Now it's important to say, Adam Bolton said that retweets aren't endorsements, and he does do a lot of retweets every day. I retweet things because I think they're of public interest. And certainly my feed has reflected a lot of people who are very concerned about the credibility of Sky News, and that I think is the important issue, the credibility of our journalism. Dali, do you think Adam Bolton has thrown them under the bus, or I presume you kind of agree with what he's retweeted there, right? I mean, Adam Bolton doesn't give a fuck. That's the thing. I mean, I don't know what is going on there. I think I would be sort of like, you didn't need to retweet that. I get it, but you didn't need to do that if I was working with him. But I also think that that kind of retweet, it's just so incendiary, and I just kind of find it quite funny. I always enjoy it when people are like the political and media class sort of fight each other. It kind of takes the pressure off a little bit from me. So it's kind of delicious to watch, to be quite honest.