Has ‘unbiased’ Beeb got it in for me?

MOST of what I have written here for the past ten years has been a warning to our elite that they will not get away with their folly for ever.

So I won’t go on at length about the UKIP vote, an electoral earthquake I have long hoped for and which I cautiously welcome.

But some of you may recall that last week I wrote a short item which – while it criticised UKIP – clearly urged a UKIP vote. On Sunday morning, a press review on BBC Radio 4 quoted only the very short passage which attacked UKIP. It also quoted other genuinely anti-UKIP articles, but none at all in support of Nigel Farage’s party.

I swiftly complained. I was given an apology which was read out on air at 5.40 this morning (exactly a week after the original offence), so you have almost certainly missed it.

But the BBC completely ignored my wider point, that this was evidence of institutional bias against me, and against UKIP.

This is the third time I have been the victim of what they insist is an isolated mistake. Fiction writer Ken Follett was not challenged or corrected on air when, on the Andrew Marr Show, he misrepresented words I had written in this column on October 24, 2010. The BBC said ‘sorry’, and I was eventually invited on to the programme to correct this.

Then the Leftist journalist Mehdi Hasan edited a quotation from this column on BBC Radio 4’s What The Papers Say on July 29, 2012, in a way that changed its meaning. The BBC swiftly broadcast an on-air apology, saying it was an ‘error’. And now this. Three ‘errors’ about one conservative columnist, all on the same supposedly impartial BBC. Three apologies. Is it just me? If so, it is beginning to look like much more than carelessness.

I have repeatedly asked the BBC if it can tell me of anyone else who has been subjected to even one comparable ‘error’, let alone three.

The response is silence. I shall be pursuing this through the BBC’s wondrous complaints system, whose winding corridors I have come to know rather well.