Shared Opinion | 13 June 2009

Each time the BNP has to tone down its rhetoric, it’s a victory for everyone else

It’s oddly unsettling, watching the media establishment trying to deal with the BNP. On Channel 4 News the other night, Krishnan Guru-Murthy was interviewing Andrew Brons, the thinner of their two toadish, loathsome MEPs, and I’m not sure that his impartiality really shone through. He had Margaret Hodge in the other chair, which didn’t help of course, because when that stricken Air France jet plunged out of the sky above the Atlantic last week, it probably sounded less shrill than Hodge at her most calm. Still, there was an edge of apoplexy there, which Guru-Murthy was fighting, and failing, to contain. I could understand it, and I’d probably have shared it, but it still looked bad. He didn’t sound reasonable. If you didn’t know the background, your sympathies might have pointed in the wrong direction entirely.