Question time

Great stuff from David Starkey on BBC Question Time last night, hammering away at Harriet Harman, David Dimbleby, Victoria Coren and Shirley Williams for having attained their current positions in society with considerable assistance from their famous and influential (and of course loaded) parents. Yes, precisely; it is pretty much the same every week. Starkey made the point that it is the left which does this sort of thing most often, although I think – looking at the cabinet and the staffing of Number 10 Downing Street – that he would be hard pressed to maintain that point.

I was on the panel of BBC Question Time this evening, in Leicester. Ed Balls' tricksy 10p tax proposal was raised, and I raised my reservation: it does very little for the low-paid. Balls says £2 a week, but Policy Exchange showed earlier how benefit withdrawal makes this a derisory 67p a week. And  this is the best the Labour Party could do to help the low paid? There should, I suggested, be a significant tax cut for the low-paid. That is to say: the equivalent of one extra month's salary a year. So how, David Dimbleby asked, would this be funded? Any which way, I replied: it could be by finding greater savings in the still-gargantuan government budget. And, if needs be, by temporarily extending the deficit.

My friend woke me up this morning. I am in a tiny apartment in Italy, finishing a book. I mean writing one, not reading one. Anyway, he rang as I was dozing — dreaming, bizarrely, that I had just been shortlisted for the Turner Prize – and delivered this torrent of violence down the phone. His animus, which was fabulous, immense, was directed towards a person called Owen Jones whom he had watched on Question Time yesterday evening. I cannot quote his diatribe in full because of the prohibition in these parts about the excessive use of foul language. But it was something like 'F****** third form arrogant public school infantile leftist ****, vile smug and self-righteous tosser…….' And so it went on.