My Thoughts for the Day on the biased BBC

On Saturday, I was guest editor of the Today programme on BBC Radio 4. I enjoyed it very much, but I feel a little envious of the reverential treatment accorded to Greta Thunberg when she filled the same slot yesterday.

Since all the other guest editors (with the possible exception of the unclassifiable Grayson Perry) – Greta, George the Poet and Lady Hale of the Supreme Court – were Leftists, I felt it was my job to stick in as many issues as possible that might challenge the BBC’S usual views. I therefore lined up abortion, hunting, the revoltingness of the Iranian regime, the danger of climate-change alarmism, the bias of the BBC in approaching these and many other subjects, and its iniquitous exploitation of the poll tax known as the licence fee.

As I always find when working with the BBC, the people who do the basic work – the producers, researchers, sound engineers, etc – are charming and helpful. It is the bureaucracy that is so astonishing.

The most amusing is that which surrounds “Thought for the Day”. This feature always appears on Today, but is controlled by a separate barony in Manchester. Over the years, it has cunningly grabbed control of a slot that is supposed to be specifically religious, and then drained it of almost all distinctively religious meaning. Anything that might appear to disagree with current secular pieties, such as LGBT issues or “diversity”, is rigorously excluded, and copy that clearly expresses orthodox Christian, Muslim or Jewish doctrine is cut.

I therefore tried to challenge TFTD (as it is always known in the trade) by getting John Humphrys to fulfil his long-stated desire of presenting an atheist Thought for the Day. Mr Humphrys was up for it, but my request was crushed by the device of saying that this could be done only if an alternative view were expressed on the same programme. I think this is what the Frankfurt School used to call “repressive tolerance”.

So I am proud that the other TFTD idea I had up my sleeve succeeded. Many Christians, including most Catholics, believe that abortion is wrong because it takes away the life of an innocent child. I decided to use last Saturday – Holy Innocents’ Day – as the moment to get this point made.

The exceptionally courageous Catholic Bishop of Portsmouth, Philip Egan, did it beautifully. I learnt that, in all the many decades of TFTD, no one has ever before been allowed to condemn abortion on air. By far the toughest nuts to crack were climate-change dogma and, of course, the BBC’S own abuse of power. On the first, I kept being told that it has to stick by an Ofcom ruling which insists that anything said against the prevailing climate-change theory must be immediately corrected by a climate scientist. I could not get the corporation’s evangelically green “environmental analyst”, Roger Harrabin, to interview the distinguished heretics – Professor Michael Kelly and Matt Ridley – whom I put up, or to appear to justify the views which he usually expresses so unrestrainedly.

On the subject of the BBC, I asked for Lord Hall, the director-general, to come on air to explain how they had got Brexit so wrong, and why they have now become preachers for wokery instead of dispassionate reporters and analysts. I also asked for John Hales, the man who writes most of those threatening letters from TV Licensing, to defend his methods of exacting the licence fee from the poor; but there were no takers.

A couple of weeks ago, the BBC was savaging Boris Johnson for refusing to be interviewed by Andrew Neil, yet now its bosses were avoiding a much less rigorous scrutiny by little me.

I am still fascinated by the case of Jolyon Maugham QC, who spent early Boxing Day morning clubbing to death a fox which was trying to molest his urban chickens.

Most of Mr Maugham’s story is comprehensible. First, the psychology. As one of our top Remainer barristers, he is experiencing difficult times. He is one of that curious 21st-century breed, the fanatical moderate. The result of the general election will have come as a terrible shock to him, and may well endanger his future ability to clog our courts with vexatious and lucrative Brexit litigation.

Second, the deed itself. Waking up after Christmas with, as he himself admits, a hangover, Mr Maugham must have wanted very much to club something to death. Sad though it was for the fox, we must all give thanks that an innocent Leaver was not passing by his Southwark residence as those barristerial fingers twitched on the handle of his baseball bat.

In this context, his actions are explicable – the sudden urge to put on his wife’s kimono to ritualise his act of slaughter; the need to impress his children by defending the hens; then the wild rush, baseball bat in hand, at the fox entangled in the netting. All symptoms of urban man’s frustrations.

What does puzzle me, though, is why Mr Maugham decided to share the incident with a wider world, by tweeting it shortly after the deed was done. Was he boasting, or was this what psychologists call “a cry for help”, seeking arrest before he does something even more desperate? I lean to the latter, more charitable explanation. As with so many Remainiacs, the balance of Mr Maugham’s mind seems disturbed.

read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion