Or maybe it’s the break in style compared with the rest of the news bulletin. Weather forecasters have much more freedom to express their personality than news, sport or business presenters do. Whatever it is, some weather forecasters are among my favourite television personalities.

Tomasz Schafernaker

Tomasz Schafernaker has long counted among my favourites. Many will have seen him in the proper news following his gaffe where he accidentally gave the middle finger gesture while on the air.

It is by no means the first time Tomasz Schafernaker has been involved in on-air hilarity. There is, for instance, his reaction to being told about his “frozen ball”.

Most infamously of all, there was his slip-up when he talked about Glastonbury’s “muddy shite”.

Laura Tobin

Laura Tobin came into focus after this astonishing incident.

The initial gaffe is surreal and hilarious. Her reaction is adorable. But the way she copes with it is the most impressive. If you tuned in five seconds after the bulletin had started, you would never know anything had happened! What a professional.

Rob McElwee

Cool as a cucumber, Rob McElwee would announce the apocalypse with a shrug of the shoulders. He is often so laid back I suspect he has had quite a good lunch! Here he is talking about severe winter weather in his normal unruffled manner.

Francis Wilson

Rob McElwee may sometimes look like he has enjoyed his lunch, but Francis Wilson looks like he has been lunching all day long. He is not a great forecaster though. His tendency to just list a series of consecutive numbers instead of actually giving you a temperature leaves the viewer perplexed as to whether to wear a duffle coat or hot pants.

Still, you can’t fault his personality. Here is a rare clip of Rory Bremner being funny, impersonating Francis Wilson.

Daniel Corbett

But the granddaddy of weather presenting personalities has to be Daniel Corbett. His enthusiasm for any kind of weather event is surely unrivalled, and his descriptions are without question the most entertaining around.

Even Tomasz Schafernaker seems to think Daniel Corbett’s style is the way to go, judging by the way he signed off from this bulletin.

How much more could George Foulkes possibly miss the point? I am trying to work out what the point of this motor-mouth is. I think it must be to come out every so often and say something so blindingly pig-headed that everyone is temporarily distracted from the fact that the Labour Party is in such trouble.

What George Foulkes doesn’t seem to understand in this video is that being paid taxpayers’ money for doing your job is not the same as being paid taxpayers’ money for doing up your home. One is perfectly normal, while the other is egregious, under-handed and borderline fraudulent.

Incidentally, his maths isn’t too hot either. £92,000 isn’t anything like twice what an MP gets paid (£64,766). It’s not even 1½ times (sans expenses, of course).

As for his claim that journalists “undermine democracy”, I don’t think I’ve heard anything so dangerous outside of a BNP pamphlet in a long time. Journalists in fact do the very opposite. They uphold democracy, and it’s just as well they exist, no matter how much they are paid, because it’s the only way these people are ever held to account.

The BBC can pay its journalists as it sees fit, and it is important for the independence of the BBC that this is the case. Unless you want the BBC to be staffed entirely by work experience kids, that means paying the market rate. Wouldn’t it be good if MPs were paid the market rate? There isn’t any shortage of applicants you know.

It is none of a politician’s business what a journalist gets paid, and it is especially dangerous for one to stick his nose into the BBC’s decisions. I think it is ominous that a politician should take such glee in telling the BBC how it should allocate its resources — and at the same time demand that it stop asking him questions that the viewers want answered. It is indeed this sort of demand that undermines democracy.

I can’t believe the rudeness of George Foulkes, and full credit to Carrie Gracie for just coming right out and revealing her salary. MPs had to have the information about their expenses prised out of their mitts, and now we know why.

Update: According to Iain Dale, George Foulkes earns £110,000 in salary from the taxpayers! Not bad work, and almost three times what a newsreader earns!! (Via Aye we can! at Malc in the Burgh.)

Chris Applegate said on Twitter:

One thing more tedious than the Olympics is people droning about how tedious the Olympics is. Turn your TV off and go out, you fucking bores

That is a sound principle and one that I agree with in general. The problem with the Olympics is that you can turn off the TV and go out all you want, but unless the place you go out to is an uninhabitable cave, the Olympics are impossible to avoid. Things like Big Brother or even US Presidential elections don’t get this bad.

Shane Richmond gets to the bottom of the problem with the Olympics:

What irritates me is that the media believes that we all subscribe to this fickle frenzy. So the Olympics breaks out of the sport pages and bulletins where it belongs and takes over the actual news too. I appreciate that the Games coincide neatly with silly season but is it really news that the opening ceremony (a) happened and (b) was spectacular? Both things were exactly what was supposed to happen, which probably makes them the precise of opposite of news.

What really gets me depressed is the fact that while this expensive shindig was going on in Beijing, two European countries were on the brink of war. And yet what was the top story in the news? This fucking stupid Stalinist fancy dress party. BBC News 24 had the two stories in split screen! I mean for fuck’s sake! Talk about priorities.

Several months ago I changed my default radio station to the BBC World Service precisely so that I could avoid the stupid “news” stories served up by Radio 5 Live and the other domestic stations. Yet the World Service has been banging on about the Olympics non-stop, 24/7, for the past three months — and that was before the games had even started! I am sick of it.

You see, my real problem with the Olympics is that it is a giant political event masquerading as sport. If it was sport I would probably quite like it. But it’s not sport at all. You can even see this in the BBC’s presentation of the opening ceremony. Who took charge of the broadcast? Sport journalists? Hell no, it was Huw Edwards and Carrie Gracie, two BBC News stalwarts. For me, that just says it all.

The only reason the Olympics opening ceremony should be a legitimate news story is to highlight how much money is wasted by governments on this pathetic political exercise. Do I care that 2008 drummers had fancy drums that lit up? Do I fuck!

The people in the video make some amusing comments, although they do exhibit the worst of the victim mentality that a lot of people in this country have. An inch of snow has fallen and it is the end of the bloody world. A train is five minutes late and it is an abomination that would never have happened under British Rail. An earthquake has hit us, woe is me. Etc, etc.

Maybe the guys in the video were being ironic when they kept on shrieking, “There’s been an earthquake! Hellooo? BBC? There’s been an earthquake!” But it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of people genuinely were enraged when the BBC didn’t cover the only interesting that has happened in their dull little lives. I have heard that Radio 5 Live has had a record number of text messages. That doesn’t surprise me, 5 Live being as it is the country’s premier forum for self-important people with anal passages in place of their mouths, wanting to phone in and describe how the world revolves around them.

Victoria Derbyshire’s programme in the morning was even worse than usual, amazingly enough. The callers I heard all said much the same thing. “My house was shaking! I thought a lorry had crashed into my house!” “I was lying in my bed and I was woken up. At first I thought it was a burglar. Little did I know that it was something even more serious!” YAWN

So parts of England got the shakes. Big deal. The stories about it on the BBC News website are a parade of mediocrity.

“The room just started shaking” Shaking?! How will you ever recover? “The quiet market town at the epicentre of the earthquake recovers”. Yeah, recovers from a few toppled chimneys!

The only casualty from the whole episode appears to be one poor man with a broken pelvis. While I certainly would not like a chimney stack to fall on top of my pelvis, it isn’t exactly September 11 in terms of casualties.

So I am not surprised that BBC News decided not to give it so much coverage. It is worth bearing in mind that after 0100 BBC News 24 ceases to be a UK service. What we get in the UK is essentially a simulcast of BBC World. As such, it reflects a global news agenda.

This is the way it should be really. UK news seldom breaks during the night, and there are few people in the UK watching at that time of night anyway. News channels are notoriously expensive to run anyway. I know certainly that Sky News makes a loss.

It would be difficult for the BBC to justify spending license payers’ money on a near-useless overnight UK service that would be watched by very few people. The BBC has a 24 hour UK news service anyway — it’s called BBC Radio 5 Live. From what I heard of their coverage, they did a pretty good job — as you would expect from the Up All Night crew.

If BBC News 24 / BBC World were to slavishly cover the earthquake like Sky News did, the majority of the BBC’s viewers scattered across the globe would have been equally indignant as the people in the UK complaining about the lack of earthquake coverage. I can just imagine people around the world uploading their commentary onto YouTube. “5 on the Richter scale? I have taken naps through that!”

People across the world look to the BBC as a source of authoritative world news. A piddly wee earthquake in Lincolnshire just doesn’t cut it. If it was an exclusively UK service like Sky News then you would indeed expect them to cover it. But it isn’t, so you wouldn’t (or at least shouldn’t).

I did actually watch a bit of Sky News’s overnight earthquake coverage and it was indeed execrable. In fact, the video I have embedded above highlights the completely different approaches of the two channels and why Sky News falls flat on its face so often.

BBC News might have been late to mention the story, but notably they got it right. They did not spend longer than required on the story, and they got the important details such as the epicentre correct. Meanwhile, Sky News were showing a map with Birmingham and Manchester pinpointed. Why? We don’t know. Sky don’t care about getting it right, as long as they can convey that something is happening — NOW!

In fact, Sky News’s coverage of the earthquake highlights everything that is wrong with 24 hour news. Media Monkey highlights their typically insightful coverage:

Sky News interviewer Faye Barker: “So, what were you doing when the quake shook?” Eyewitness, or should that be earwitness, from Lincolnshire: “I was in bed.” Barker: “Oh… [Pause]. And would you say it felt more like a juggernaut or a freight train going past?” Woman: “Er… a freight train.”

Sky News is also rightly being criticised today for a truly disgusting interview conducted by the diabolical Kay Burley. She was previously famous for her measured response on September 11: “If you’re just joining us, the entire eastern seaboard of the United States has been decimated by a terrorist attack.” This week she asked the wife of recently convicted serial killer Steve Wright the following question:

Do you think if you’d had a better sex life, he wouldn’t have done this?

What a vile question to ask. Not surprisingly, the interviewee burst into tears upon being asked that question. Imagine having that thought running through your head — “If only I had sex with my husband a bit more, those five prostitutes wouldn’t have been murdered.”

Unity, Jennie and Mitch Benn say all that needs to be said.

If BBC News lost respect for its slow response to the earthquake, goodness knows what Sky News must have lost.

Anyway, I think the way the latest revelations have been covered by the media prove my point. Predictably enough, many people have sprung up to bash the BBC for fixing competition results. And while this is indeed despicable, what these people have ignored is the fact that every single other major broadcaster has done this. This is not a problem with the BBC. It is a symptom of the state of the MSM as a whole.

Earlier this year, record fines were handed out after viewers of Channel 4 and Channel Five were defrauded. Votes cast via premium rate phone lines were not counted on ITV programmes. Today the boss of GMTV resigned.

It is worth also remembering that the BBC is the only major broadcaster in the country that hasn’t had its fingers in the utterly deceitful quiz scam channel craze that has dogged airwaves of the past two years. In this sense, the BBC looks pretty clean compared to its commercial rivals.

Because most of the faked BBC competition results (with the exception of the truly shocking Liz Kershaw ones) were of the “panicking producer” variety. Meanwhile, the commercial broadcasters built up an entire industry that was desliberately designed to misleadingly part viewers with their cash.

It is nigh on impossible to think of a commercial broadcaster that has not played a part in this massive scam. Programmes such as Quiz Call (set up and formerly owned by Channel 4; still broadcast to this day by Channel Five), ITV Play and Quiz Night Live (produced by Endemol and broadcast on a channel owned by Telewest / NTL / Virgin). Viacom’s TMF broadcast Pop the Q, Emap’s channels featured the truly dire Cash Call. BSkyB have Sky Vegas. Few commercial broadcasters are clean.

None of this is to excuse the BBC though. Encouraging viewers to use premium rate phone lines to enter non-existent competitions is unacceptable. But the BBC cases do not have nearly as strong a whiff as the ones involving its commercial rivals.

And there is not a smidgen of the hypocrisy that has come from the newspapers surrounding the premium rate scandals of this year. Newspapers were quick to jump up and down when Richard & Judy and The X Factor got caught up in it all. But they remained conspicuously quiet when it came to similar premium rate phone lines used by themselves.

Meanwhile, the BBC’s own coverage of the scandal was notable for how harsh it was on itself. I have always felt that, despite (or perhaps because of?) the constant allegations of bias, the BBC provides incredibly dispassionate coverage on any stories that involves itself.

I remember that on the day of the Hutton Report I was glued to BBC News 24. While you could argue that the BBC would be biased in favour of itself, for the same reasons Sky would be biased against the BBC.

It’s just that the magnifying glass is forever focussed on the BBC, so they cannot afford to be biased, particularly when talking about themselves. So they way they covered it was professional and detached, although there was a slightly surreal moment when you could see everyone in the newsroom rushing towards the corridor where Greg Dyke appeared. For a journalist to maintain a stiff upper lip when the story literally surrounds them in this way is seriously impressive.

I first learned about the BBC phone-in problems on BBC News 24 itself, and you would have thought that the scandal was almost as seismic as Hutton. But the problems seem to be roughly on a par with ITV’s problems with The X Factor, and certainly nothing reaching the outright deception of, say, Richard & Judy or GMTV.

And, as Matt Wardman points out:

have Sky manipulated their phone-ins? If they had, how would we find out?

That is the key. Only the BBC has the ability to be as self-critical as it is, even though it can sometimes do a lot of damage. And they never seem to get any thanks for it.

• More on the fake television scandal from Scaryduck

I’ve just been watching news coverage of that train derailment in Cumbria. Incidentally, Sky News’ coverage was awful. They had somebody from Virgin Trains on the phone and the questions were unforgivably banal.

Presenter: So, can you tell us something about the train? How many carriages were there on the train, because there seems to be some confusion as to whether there were six or nine carriages.
Virgin Trains man: There are nine carriages.
[Long pause.]
Presenter: Err, can you tell us something more about the train?
[I switch back to News 24.]

BBC News 24 was slightly more watchable. I was thinking about my post about user generated content in the mainstream media. This is exactly the sort of news story where UGC works well.

Quite soon after the story has broken we have seen photographs taken from inside an upside-down carriage that helps illustrate the seriousness of the crash. Of course, the eyewitness accounts are also helpful, although I’m not sure if this properly counts as user generated content (really they are just interviews).

But then News 24 went and ruined it by flashing a “Speak Your Brains Have Your Say” logo at the bottom of the screen and spending a short while reading out viewers’ emails. The first one was quite interesting — a viewer had seen what looked like a flash of lightning from the train line, which they now took to be a train crash. Hardly earth-shattering stuff, but at least it’s not totally banal.

But after that they really started scraping the barrel. The usually unflappable Tim Willcox was stumbling as he struggled to find more interesting emails:

“Err, and we have another one… here…, umm. “Just seen the train crash. Genuine best wishes to all of those involved”… umm. Yess. Do keep those emails coming in.”

This illustrates my point perfectly. With the photographs from inside the train, viewers saw an instance where UGC genuinely added something to the story. Just minutes later, the mundane emails showed up the pitfalls of relying on viewers’ input too much.

And, as Ryan Morrison pointed out in the comments to my other post, it was probably a sign that it was time to move on to another story, even if the train derailment news is still developing.

Some people seem dead set on framing the whole issue as some kind of colossal battle between the mainstream media and citizen journalism. But bloggers often depend on the mainstream media for its stories — with a few notable exceptions of course. And by the same token, the mainstream media depends on citizens more and more to send in images of big news events such as the London bombings.

This is all well and good, but unfortunately it has become a sickeningly trendy thing for news outlets to do now. Now every time a turkey sneezes it’s all, “Send us your pictures to news@sky.com”, or even worse, “Have your say by recording yourself on your 3G phone.” I mean really. UGC has become a gimmick used by news channels to make them look all hip and cool.

Channel Five News seems particularly keen on the idea of citizen journalism. But they are so eager to push it forward that they end up completely missing the point. For one thing, one report I saw was an irredeemably dull item about cycle lanes. Not cycle lanes in general. Cycle lanes in one gentleman’s town.

Clearly, this man was quite concerned about cycle lanes (I can’t remember why, it was so boring). But what had obviously happened was that he emailed some special “Speak your brains” email address and some producer picked it up and said, “Great! That’s a really boring story, just like what them citizen journalists are into. Let’s do it!” And then they sent along a professional production crew and got this chap to talk about cycle lanes.

But that isn’t citizen journalism at all. The production crew probably made the decision that he would cheesily present the whole item in his cycling gear, riding down the cycle lanes and then “happening to bump into a camera” and mouth off about cycle lanes in a monotone fashion.

All they needed was a pointless two-way and that would have been it — citizen journalism becomes everything that’s bad about the mainstream media. Essentially it was a normal news report in every way, except that it was presented by somebody with little or no television experience. This is more like Points of View than blogging. In the blogosphere, this “story” about cycle lanes would never have attracted any attention whatsoever. Channel Five decided to put it on its prime time news programme.

The point for me about blogging is that normal-ish people have a big conversation. Sometimes they write about their own experiences and create their own stories about the world around them. People eventually find like-minded people and share their experiences, debate and have a conversation. Channel Five just took some guy with a hobby horse and plonked him in front of a camera.

Radio Five Live recently had some boring thing called “Your Five Live” or something. I think it lasted an entire week. And it was terrible. All week they were trailing a special debate to be. chaired by that voice of reason Stephen Nolan, about “the issue you told us concerned you the most”. Yes, you guessed it — immigration. That issue that seems to attract the regular Five Live phone-in callers but doesn’t seem to fuss people in the blogosphere that much.

I didn’t listen to the debate. I would probably have found it too depressing. It would have been a carnival of the knuckle-draggers. Maybe I am being a snob. Surely these are normal people who have every right to voice their opinion. Well, yes. But any old fool can rant down a microphone.

As I said, the point about blogging is that you have a proper discussion and a debate. Sometimes Five Live manages this, but more often it doesn’t. You just get somebody inflicting us with his verbal diarrhoea before being cut off by the presenter because it’s time for the news.

And just have a look at BBC News 24 or Sky News. Large chunks of the day are often dedicated to “Have your say” “debates”. What this actually means is numbskulls sending in emails and some editor somewhere picking the juiciest ones which a presenter then reads one line of. What you get is half a dozen emailers all of which have their own personal chips on their shoulder — but no conversation, no debate, no intelligence.

A new programme on Channel 4 caught my eye this weekend. It’s called Homemade, and it actually bills itself as YouTube for the television. People generate their own content and submit it to Channel 4. But once again this completely misses the point. The point about YouTube is that you decide for yourself what you want to watch.

Homemade is still put together by a bunch of television professionals who have chosen what they would like us to watch. The viewer gets no choice in the matter here. And we could especially do without the annoying Dave Berry presenting links between all of the clips.

All we have now is a rag-bag of items filmed on poor-quality cameras. Presumably the producers of Homemade thought the randomness and low quality images was what made YouTube popular. Well, not so. Most people just use YouTube to watch actual television programmes anyway.

The mainstream media needs to realise what user generated content can actually be useful for. At the moment, it is just a trendy gimmick — and its uses get more annoying by the week. People will always want television stations to create quality, big-budget programmes. If people wanted something home made they would watch YouTube, not Channel 4.

As for the news programmes, they need to be more aware that their job is to report the big news stories with expert analysis. If people wanted to know what people on the street thought, they would just read a blog. As things stand, user generated content on news programmes are toe-curlingly embarassing and always encourage me to switch off.

That is not to say that citizens can’t have an input in the news. Images of Concorde on fire and the inside of the bombed train in London genuinely added to the story, and professionals were not in a position to film these. That is the sort of cooperation between “citizens” and the “mainstream media” that can work brilliantly. The rest is just awful, gimmicky rubbish.

This post by Kevin Anderson is very interesting. The key quote:

The mainstream media believes that “user-generated content” has to come through their sites, their walled gardens of tightly controlled participation, so they miss the vastly larger opportunity that exists on the internet as a whole.

Here is what Shuggy thinks about it:

Think about it: they tell people from other countries what team they should cheer for and if anyone should disagree, they are accused of racism.

The England Project has a rather dramatic post:

This football kerfuffle is a sorry measure of the health of the Union

…The argument that Scotland is a different country from England and, therefore, there is no reason why Scots. should support an English team is a reasonable one taken in isolation of the British Union. Supporters of the British Union are, in my opinion, on less solid ground. I see it as the duty of British Unionists to support any British team in any sporting competition with their own country naturally taking preference.

That approach is just wrong, as David Farrer pointed out a couple of weeks ago. Scottish, Welsh and (increasingly) English nationalists seem to believe that the rivalry between Scotland and England on the football pitch is a sign that the United Kingdom could not possibly be a single country, and therefore should be scrapped.

So I take it that the rivalry between Rangers and Celtic is evidence that Glasgow is a failed experiment? And a Spurs fan’s resentment of Arsenal means that London should be split up? Nonsense. And if anybody called for the UK to pull out of the EU because of England’s rivalry with Germany, they ought to be laughed out of the planet. There may be legitimate reasons to call for the end of the British Union, but a football match is rather stretching it.

The London-based media probably has a lot to do with the rise of Scottish nationalism in the second half of the 20^th century. That maybe shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. This letter in The Economist illustrates the reason:

Before devolution, the impression was that the English did not really notice Scotland, regarding it at best as a kilted extension of the Lake District.

Last week I suggested that England is shoved down your throat in Scotland. Since then I have seen BBC News 24 (a news channel for crying out loud!) insert various ‘Come on En-ger-land’ messages in its countdown sequences. And now that the World Cup itself has come we have had to endure commentators shoehorning England into everything, every which way they can. For instance, here is what ITV’s commentator said during the Argentina–Ivory Coast game:

Well, Argentina have had 20 years of hurt — they’ve only had half of it.

WHAAAAT? Every single thing has to relate to England, doesn’t it?

I once even heard a commentator — I think it was John Motson — say, at the start of a World Cup final, “Of course, this is the final that England could have been in…” That was very perceptive of him. Of course, it was also the final that every single other team in the world could have been in.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that the media likes to concentrate on England, given that at least 80% of the potential audience will be living in England. But by the same token I don’t think anybody should be too shocked if Scots decide to support whoever is playing England just as a reaction against smug commentators. And it is possible to have a strong Scottish identity and still be in favour of the UK — infact, I am sure that the majority of my friends are like this.

FIFA and whoever else ever proposes a British football team ought to remember this aswell. Football has nothing to do with the Union.

Update: Iain Dale asks, Will You Support a European Team Against the Americans?

[In the World Cup today] I will be supporting the Americans without any hesitation. Yet when the Ryder Cup is played later in the year I will be shouting for the Europeans, partly I suppose because there will be British golfers on the European team. But it’s still a total inconsistency on my part. But isn’t that the beauty of sport? There’s no logic to sporting affinity at all.

But the news channels have recently become pretty unwatchable in the evening. Whenever I tune into News 24′s hyped-up star lineup of Emily Maitlis and Ben Brown it seems awfully uncomfortable. There seem to be awkward pauses, stilted banter and duff links all over the shop. Last week I saw Ben Brown interrupt himself when he was reading the autocue: “– as my colleage just has a sneeze there…” I’m sure Emily Maitlis was delighted that he pointed it out!

I don’t doubt that Ben Brown has had enough of getting shot at in warzones, but he never looks quite at home when he’s sitting at the desk. He always has an expression on his face like a sullen schoolboy, still in the huff having just returned from standing in the corner. I bet his shirt isn’t tucked in underneath the desk.

At the same time on the other side, though, it’s so much worse. Sky News’ James uhhh Rubin is really errr quite uhhh wooden a-a-nd uhhh… hesitant. But I guess you should expect some of that as he’s not had much experience as a television presenter (makes him an odd person for Sky News to employ as a prime time news presenter though). Mind you, he certainly seems to know his stuff.

Rubin never seems startled — he never looks like a ‘rabbit caught in the headlights’ as some newsreaders do from time to time. Instead, he just stares. And stares and stares and stares. I think he’s actually trying to solve a Magic Eye puzzle.

“I think I can see a pyramid!”

(Image nicked from TV Newsroom.)

There is some pretty weird logic going on about this. Apparently Simon Hughes should be condemned — not because of his homosexual relationships, oh no!, but because of his lying. But if you want to know why he felt the need to lie about it, just look at The Sun story that broke it. It was filled with homophobic jibes about “Limp Dems” and “another one biting the pillow”. And if you think that’s just me having a sense of humour failure, do you really think any newspaper, even The Sun, would get away with calling, for instance, a black Tory a “Coonservative”?

The thing is, Simon Hughes did not reveal that he was gay. He did something far worse — he admitted to being bisexual. Because being bisexual opens you up to prejudice and attacks from both straight and gay people, it’s a pretty big step for Hughes to take. It also means that he was right when he said that he didn’t lie, although it could have been misleading, when he denied being gay.

People say, “oh, why couldn’t he have used the Cameron defence?” They forget that the Cameron defence happened in 2005 and drugs are cool things that Average Joe uses. Apparently the 1980s were quite a hostile time — even more hostile than it is right now — to be gay. I wasn’t around in 1983 so I can’t say, although I have no reason to doubt that. If in the early 1980s he was asked if he was gay and just batted away the question without denying it he would have been accused of being evasive, and people would probably have said he was gay anyway (not that denying it helped Hughes on that front anyway).

Given that you apparently have to be married with kids to be accepted as a top politician (similar rumours about Gordon Brown’s sexual orientation continue to hound him because he left it until he was a bit old to have kids), it should be no surprise that Hughes wanted to keep it under his hat.

Look at this from idiot Lowri Turner (via Martin Stabe):

…I don’t think gay men make good party leaders or Prime Ministers. This has nothing to do with what they do in bed but everything to do with their lives in general.

Before I am accused of prejudice, I should say that not only are some of my best friends gay, but probably most of them are. I work in the media, for goodness sake. [aaaaaarggfghghghgh] It is precisely because I know such a lot of gay men that I can say that I don’t think many of them are capable of representing the interests of the vast majority of people.

Their lifestyles are too divorced from the norm. They are not better or worse, but they are different.

Gay men face challenges of their own, but they do not face those associated with having children which is the way most of us live…

What a grade-A idiot. And it’s because of these sorts of views, which are clearly still common in today’s supposedly enlightened society, that Simon Hughes had to deny that he was a bisexual.

Another reason why Simon Hughes is apparently fair game is because of the Bermondsey by-election. You know, that one where dissident Labour members launched homophobic attacks against the Labour candidate. There was a Liberal leaflet that called the election “a straight choice” — although it doesn’t say anything like “Simon Hughes is the straight choice” as most people are trying to make out. “A straight choice” is a very common term to use on election leaflets — even Labour used it last year, so it’s a bit much to be criticising the Liberals for using it against Labour almost a quarter of a century ago.

I was watching BBC News 24′s weekly political roundup last night, and this very issue was discussed. All of the pannelists condemned the slogan. The irony seemed to be lost on all of the guests — the programme they were on was called Straight Talk. So they were on a homophobic television programme, were they? Actually, they probably were. Paraphrasing guest Ann Leslie: “Haha, did you see The Sun? They called him a Limp Dem! AHHahahaah!” None of the other pannelists or the presenter suggested that the homophobia might be a bit out of order. Must be the liberal Biased BBC again, huh?

As for the “I’ve been kissed by Peter Tatchell” badges, have a read on Wikipedia — gay homophobes, eh? Obviously it looks a tad ironic given this week’s news about Simon Hughes’ private life. But since Hughes didn’t actually have anything to do with the badges, I think he can be let off on that front.