Why I don’t regret leaving the BBC

I have just had my second jab and it poses a dilemma. As an assiduous Covid rule-taker, I have been appalled by those — including friends and relatives — who have flouted or sidestepped the regulations and guidelines in the belief that they don’t apply to them. ‘We know we shouldn’t but it’s good for us’ or ‘We use our common sense’, they say. Since the issue is as incendiary as Brexit, I have fumed in silence. Of course the rules are anomalous and inadequately explained by ministers but I tend to trust the scientists. That said, the mantra ‘no one is safe until we are all safe’ is clearly nonsensical. Unlike those who are still waiting, I am now as safe as I am ever going to be. Hence my dilemma. I long to hug my grandchildren but that would still be to violate the rules. I am tempted to ‘use my common sense’. After all, ‘it will be good for me’, and it is all about me, isn’t it?

It is now exactly two years since I told the BBC that I was giving up chairing Radio 4’s ‘flagship’ debate programme, Any Questions? I am still asked if I regret it — to which I always answer truly that I don’t. After 32 years of lost Fridays I wanted to liberate myself from the BBC’s impartiality protocols, important as these are. Yet old habits die hard. This does not mean that I am like the great A.J.P. Taylor, who once told me and a flutter of other moths around him at a long-ago Spectator party: ‘I have strong opinions weakly held.’ It is simply that I have come to loathe that loud-mouthed intemperance which passes for lively public debate — an aversion that has been underpinned latterly by reading the foul utterances of Hitler and Goebbels for my new book.