Refuge from the referendum

A brief encounter with Radio 4’s Any Questions to gauge the measure of opinion in the shires after the referendum result was enough to convince me we are entering even more torrid times than during the campaign. For some mysterious reason both Harriet Harman and Alex Salmond, billed in Radio Times to appear on the panel alongside Ken Clarke and Chris Grayling, had reneged on their promise and been replaced by Emily Thornberry, the Labour MP who got into trouble in 2014 for her white van man tweet, and Steven Woolfe, an oxymoronic Ukip MEP. The audience, judging from the applause, were pretty much balanced between the Leavers and Remainers but within minutes Thornberry and Woolfe were at each other’s throats, their venom poisoning the airwaves, each asserting a superior claim to council-estate compassion. With relief, when I switched over to Radio 3, I discovered that it was Bridget Kendall’s turn to introduce Saturday Classics as her swansong before she leaves the BBC to take up her new position as Master of Peterhouse at Cambridge University.