Don't tell Iain Dale but I've been on the BBC Again

Please don���t tell Iain Dale, the publisher, former Tory parliamentary candidate and broadcaster, who thinks that my occasional guest appearances on the BBC, in which I cannot choose the subject under discussion and can be shut up by the presenter at any time , somehow negate my complaint that BBC is unsympathetic to my point of view. But I was on two BBC discussion programmes over the weekend.

 

The first was Radio 4���s Any Questions, as it happens my first appearance on this programme for more than two years ( I was rather proud of my last appearance, in April 2013, when I responded to Lord Heseltine���s weary jibe ��� of didn���t you used to be a Trotskyite?��� by asking him ���Didn���t you used to be a conservative?��� Which caused an enjoyable silence).

 

On this occasion I was sitting next to Nicky Morgan, the Education Secretary,. Also on the panel were Chuka Umunna, the man who might one day be Labour leader, and Frances O���Grady, the TUC general secretary.   You may be able to work out for yourselves why I was slightly puzzled by the order and shape in which the questions came up. Subjects included bombing Syria, child tax credits, trade union laws and Jeremy Corbyn,

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b061tsym

 

Then there was Sunday Morning live, in which we discussed how to help people not to get fat (with a sideswipe at the ���addiction��� fiction), civil liberty and whether Britain is still a Christian country. The was quite a high number of those silly twitter comments in which people complained that they had found themselves agreeing with the hated Peter Hitchens. That unfamiliar sensation is called ���Thinking���, guys. Try not to let it happen too often, or you might end up like me.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b063jwgd