The New Labour assault on John Humphrys was inevitable, not because he is a Tory (I have no reason to suppose he is) but because he defies Labour’s Gestapo, being always scrupulously fair. He interviewed me last week in a debate with the genial Mr Billy Bragg. When Mr Bragg misrepresented something I had said, Mr Humphrys immediately corrected him and set the record straight. Instead of being castigated by a director-general who manifestly lives in fear of his masters in No. 10, Mr Humphrys should be given a huge pay rise and put in charge of improving the training of other BBC journalists.
One offence he would never commit is to join in the BBC’s insulting use of the phrase ‘right-wing’. I first noticed this a couple of years ago when interviewed on The World This Weekend. One of my fellow interviewees was introduced as a journalist, the other as a Lib Dem peeress, and I as ‘a right-wing controversialist’.
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