Mike, who is Mark? And, what did he say? You’ve said his question is valid but given not indication of who he is or what his question or conclusion was.

I wonder whether Laura K would’ve bothered tweeting about this topic if Mr Salem was a conservative activist? Something along the lines of, “Turns out the father of the sick child is a Tory activist and even he challenged the PM.”
Somehow I doubt that. But if she had, then no doubt the Mail et al would be up in arms decrying the BBC for its ‘left-wing’ bias.

Also, what exactly does ‘activist’ mean? The unwritten assumption in LK’s very disingenuous tweet is that he’s a life-long tribal LP member, fanatical supporter of Momentum and a full on ‘red under the bed’ Corbynista with a serious chip on his shoulder. She should’ve put a ‘wink,wink, nudge, nudge’ emojo at the end of her tweet as her implied use of the word ‘activist’ was about as subtle as my description above.

The above may seem a petty point but it’s of interest to me because if I’d been in Mr Salem’s shoes then I too could class as a ‘Labour activist’ when nothing could be further from the truth, for the following reasons:

I’ve never been a card carrying member of any political party but I always used to vote Labour in General Elections until a decade ago. Since then I’ve always voted Green in general elections. This is because my Labour MP has such a huge majority (30,000+) she can manage without my vote and I didn’t/don’t want the poor sod standing as a Green to lose his/her deposit. A kind of protest vote if you will to try and make Labour take green policies more seriously.
In council elections I swing between Labour and Green depending on the policies put forward by the candidates involved. In the Referendum I voted remain, and in the EU elections I voted Green (she got in.) Hardly the record of a committed Labour ‘activist’ is it!

However, my parent’s MP was Ester McVey and, as my parent’s full-time carer, I had some dealings with Fester McVile. As such I ended up thoroughly despising the woman, but I personally couldn’t vote against her in the 2015 General Election as I lived in a different constituency. So instead I spent some of my precious spare time volunteering for the Labour candidate as a doorstop campaigner.
Labour won, overturning EM’s majority of just under 2,500 with a hardly impressive new one of just over 400 for Margaret Greenwood. In the 2017 election I did likewise as MG’s majority was so small and I both liked and admired her as a constituency MP for my parents. She won again, this time with a majority of just under 5,400.

Had I been in a similar position to Mr Salem collaring Johnson about my sick child then perhaps LK would also consider me to be a ‘Labour activist’ because of my fairly light campaigning on behalf of Labour.
But if she’d bothered to check with me first then she’d have found out that if the Lib-dems or Greens were best placed to oust Fester McVile then I’d have campaigned for them instead. My sole reason for campaigning in 2015 was to oust McVile by any legal means possible. Nobody, not even a Lib-dem, could possibly be as bad as McVile!
Likewise with the 2017 GE. I campaigned for Labour simply because they had the best anti-austerity manifesto. Further, had Margaret Greenwood had a large majority prior to the 2017 election I wouldn’t have bothered campaigning for her at all. But a 417 vote majority was to close and I wanted to do my best to stop another Tory getting in, especially with their disability bashing agenda. I, by the way, do not have any disabilities… so far, fingers crossed.
Given the above, I too could’ve been called a ‘labour activist’ by LK, and ended up being dogpiled, except I’m not on either twitter or face book…. Thank god!

Maybe LK did carry out a full fact check on Mr S and he is indeed a dedicated Labour activist? But so what.
In a fair and sane society it shouldn’t make a blind bit of difference what kind of activist Mr S actually was/is regarding the issues raised by his challenge to Johnson. It’s those issues that should be being addressed and not his ‘activism’ of whatever stripe or colour.
This highlighting of Mr S’s activism (real, imagined or exaggerated) puts LK’s tweet into the ‘Look, there’s a squirrel over there’ type of deflection from the actual issues raised.
That’s hardly the actions of an impartial political journalist, and she should be well and truly hauled over the coals for that alone.
Factor in that she was aiming her tweet at a father with a seriously ill week old baby to worry about then, as a supposedly experienced journalist, she’s either as thick as Fester McVile not to realise the impact her tweet would have. Or she’s as vicious as McVile if she did realise it and posted it anyway; probably a bit of both. Either way, she should be doubled hauled over the coals, but I bet she isn’t. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she ends up with some kind of knighthood or what have you for ‘services rendered.’