Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

How I was ambushed by Nick Robinson

Ah, the BBC. There’s really nothing like it is there?

This morning I had the pleasure of appearing on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. I know what you’re already thinking: ‘You fool, you fool – it’s a trap’. But I was phoned last night and asked if I would come on this morning to discuss Barack Obama’s recent remarks against ‘wokeness’.

At some inconvenience to myself I rearranged my schedule, got up early and headed to the BBC. Only to discover that I was today’s BBC effort at replaying the recent Rod Liddle – Emily Maitlis exchange. 

I was on with a professor of grievance studies from Birmingham City University called Kehinde Andrews. Which is fair enough. But poor Kehinde barely got a chance to talk, because as with Maitlis vs Liddle, Nick Robinson (who was presenting Today this morning) seemed to think that his principle job was to ‘call out’ this terrible Murray man who his producers had invited on.

We managed to get roughly one-and-a-half questions out about what Barack Obama had said. And then Nick Robinson inadvertently demonstrated the problem Barack Obama and I have tried to warn against by promptly trying to ‘cancel’ me.

Specifically, he suddenly started asking about a piece of mine from after the third terrorist attack of 2017 (a context he chose not to provide) which had the headline ‘Never mind singing John Lennon songs… if we want peace then we need one thing – less Islam.’

 Of course Robinson just quoted the last bit of this headline and then put it to me that this is exactly the sort of statement that should allow people to be ‘cancelled’.

There are a number of ways that you can respond to an ambush like this. I mentioned that of course we can do this to every writer and journalist if we wanted to.

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