I do an annual round up of the year on Radio 5's Chiles programme, always with the same two fellow guests: Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (who, as regular readers will know, is one of my favourite people in the world); and David Loyn, the BBC's World Affairs Correspondent.
I happen to think that Ms A-B is stupid, dangerous and offensive; but she is a pundit who is, of course, entitled to air her views (and they have us on together because it makes for good listening). Mr Loyn is rather different: as a BBC correspondent, he is supposedly a neutral observer.
Pah! I am used to hearing his thinly veiled - but nonetheless veiled - casual liberal anti-Americanism, offered up in the insufferably righteous tones in which such BBC types specialise. But even I was not prepared for this choice offering from him on our programme today:
"If America was engaged in the rest of the world rather than, frankly, wanting to bomb it and, as Yasmine says, take its resources..." (he went on to say that if the $41 billion increase in the defence budget was instead handed over to the WHO then all of Africa's ills could be obliterated).
Just in case that isn't clear, let's spell it out: the BBC's World Affairs Correspondent, a pretty pivotal position at the moment, believes that the rationale behind US foreign policy is that America wants to bomb the rest of the world and take its resources for her own use.
It's an obervation which could have come straight from the mouth of Osama, but because it's uttered in the received pronunciation of Mr Loyn's BBC tones, no one even noticed it until I picked him up on it.
And people wonder if the BBC is anti-American.
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