Richard Littlejohn

It's easy to criticise, and Richard Littlejohn gave a perfect example of this on Question Time, exhibiting the expected behaviour of the obligatory right-wing columnist (see Starkey, Mackenzie, Hitchens) on the show.

While the party representatives attempted to dissect and argue the issues, every time Littlejohn assumed that the audience were getting lost in debate going over their heads, he leapt in and targeted a populist response with the familiar 'they're all the same' and 'what the British people want' rhetoric.

At one point in the aftermath of his attack on the Liberal Democrats, Littlejohn rested his hand on Sarah Teather's in a slightly sickening manner, bringing to mind the image of a lecherous news editor drooling over his new intern. Teather, to her credit, waited the moment out, although did subsequently struggle to formulate her subsequent argument, as any human would given the same position.

The most absurd moment was when Littlejohn had to bully a questioner into silence when the plausible suggestion that he was the BNP's favourite columnist was raised.

The Guardian writer Victoria Coren was also a weak link on the show however, offering meaningless throw-away points and pathetic jokes on serious issues. This does raise the question of why we need anyone other than politicians on Question Time. Why can we not have representatives from the Greens and UKIP and debate real policy instead?

The issue is that in this country we have a big problem with failing to hold our media accountable. David Dimbleby bumbles through in the manner of a Boris Johnson without the pseudo-charm, interrupting and cutting off the politicians, but consistently fails to cross-question the newspaper journalists on the points they make. When, at the end he turned on Littlejohn over the Daily Mail's reporting of Joanna Lumley, Dimbleby for a moment realised he had the columnist on the ropes, and immediately retreated.