Question Time: Who He?

According to the little blurb that popped up on Freeview to describe the shortened Question Time last night, the panellists were “Tessa Jowell, Ken Clarke, Vince Cable and Fern Britton”.

No mention, then, even two days after the initial broadcast, of Douglas Murray, a person of manifestly less political importance than Fern Britton.

That Murray was there at all in these post-Bush days indicates that the practice of choosing fifth panellists at random out of David Dimbleby’s high society address book has been resumed, if it ever really stopped.

So the pretence that Murray is a think tank should have been abandoned accordingly. Instead, he should have been billed honestly, as “Too Rich To Need To Work”, since he was on the panel for that reason alone.