Taking part in a BBC McDebate

I was on the new BBC Sunday Live programme this morning, talking – if you can call it that – about Tony Hayward's £1m pay-off. I had forgotten just how frustrating those kind of programmes are.

It is a fantasy, of the BBC and others, that getting lots of people to phone in with comments and having a studio panel with others, who are not particularly well-informed, is somehow a contribution to democracy.

In practice, the technology barely worked. The phone-in consisted of one Scottish lady say...