The Loony Right

Limit Child Benefit to the first two children, abolish the contributory element of Employment and Support Allowance, take away the Carers' Allowance from 40 per cent of the people receiving it, and tax disability benefits.

Before anyone asks, I have been turned down five or six times, which is how I know that anyone who gets through must indeed be in a very bad way.

Conveniently, Newsnight decided to dispense with politics altogether. The four items were mental illness among airline pilots, Amanda Knox, the last grand piano in Gaza, and the art of old-fashioned letter-writing, complete with a reading by Benedict Cumberbatch.

But then, what would have been made of any of this by, say, James Landale, David Cameron's old school chum whose idea of journalism is to pop round in casual attire and stay for whatever it is that posh people call the meal in question, even to the point of chopping the carrots?

Switch over, and who else might have provided any insight? Cameron's awestruck auditor, but Ed Miliband's prolonged heckler, Kay Burley?

Like backgrounds on the Loony Right think tank circuit and in its attendant student networks, Loony Right views of this kind are given a completely free pass. They are treated as normal, as "the centre ground".

Read the comments under almost any post, although those about Jeremy Clarkson are a good place to start at the moment, on the Telegraph and Spectator websites, or on Guido Fawkes, or on Breitbart London.

These people are truly unhinged. On Breitbart, in particular, much of what appears above the line has scant acquaintance with sanity, either.

There are the claims to represent working-class opinion while defending the right of some upper-middle-class oaf to "lamp an underling", and there the claims to represent the hardworking private sector by people who do absolutely nothing apart from post comments on those sites morning, noon and night.

Like many other aspects, both of those would be funny. But, like many other aspects, they are not.

Yet, by sheer force of bellowing, those views dominate the national debate to such an extent that even Ed Miliband dare not express the obvious way to prevent private profiteering from the National Health Service, which everyone apart from the Loony Right regards as the quintessence of British national identity and as absolutely sacrosanct.

That was something else that Newsnight felt unworthy of coverage, doubtless because such attention would have involved the BBC's mentioning NHS privatisation at all. It has spent five years absolutely refusing to do so, for fear of creating a permanent Labour lead of between 10 and 20 points.

In vain has poor Tim Stanley tried to suggest that his readers would hate the "boorish Eighties materialism" of Jeremy Clarkson if they met him in the flesh. To those readers, anything other than boorish Eighties materialism is the Islamo-Marxist work of the EUSSR.

They believe it. They really and truly believe it. And although it is not clear that a lot of them even live in the United Kingdom, or have in some cases ever set eyes on this country, the entire debate, even to the point of naming the so-called moderators, is conducted in order to please them.

They are Jeremy Clarkson, and rest of us are Oisin Tymon.