After ‘Faith’, why not a BBC docudrama onTony Blair as an untrustworthy airhead?

I well remember the Conservative party’s shadow secretary of state for culture, media and sport. As I never tire of reminding him, in days long gone, before John Whittingdale became the Member of Parliament for Maldon & East Chelmsford, he and I were young Turks together at the Conservative research department. Our boss was Chris Patten. The year must have been about 1978, and Chris had deputed me over to the office of the leader of the opposition, where I served Margaret Thatcher as her correspondence clerk.

But I kept in touch with pals at our office in Old Queen Street, not least John Whittingdale, for he and I shared a love of punk rock. I remember in particular a night out at the Lyceum in the Strand. John recalls the entire billing that night so I had better not venture my hazier recollections, lest he correct me as to whether that was or was not the night Stiff Little Fingers were playing, or who else was on the bill. But I do distinctly remember a band called 999 and a number they had made their own whose chorus was ‘Police oppression!’

Everybody on the floor of the Lyceum — or at least everybody whose plastic pint glasses of cheap lager were not too full to permit it — used to leap up and down in a dance of the utmost simplicity called the Pogo. To this chorus we would punch the air with a clenched right fist as we shouted along with the chorus: ‘Police oppression!’, punch, ‘Police oppression!’, all the while leaping into the air. It was hot, it was sweaty, it was heady and it was fun.

So permit me a wry smile as I read in my newspapers this weekend, the following:

‘Whittingdale: BBC’s judgment is a disgrace.