Orwell/Wells

"It's not quite War of the Worlds but some say there's something Orwellian about..."

Who says the BBC is dumbing down?

Mr. Benn

Iain Dale links to an interview of Hilary Benn by Joshua Chambers, a student reporter at the University of York's radio station; they are discussing the release, and alleged torture, of Binyam Mohamed, it is definitely worth a listen. Hilary Benn - the son of one of the finest Parliamentarians, most deluded ideologues and incompetent ministers of the Twentieth Century, Tony Benn - is repeatedly made to look an uncaring prat by a student radio reporter; Benn clings to a useless script, a brief he appears not to have taken the trouble to research beyond the sophistic soundbite he clings to throughout.

The fact that Mohamed is not a British subject, but is instead a man who resided here from 1994 until he decided to travel to Afghanistan in June 2001 to attend an Al-Qaeda training camp, and that his much-discussed "torture" falls into the same blurred debate as the treatment of all the Guantanamo detainees is never mentioned by Benn. Chambers is able to run rings around him precisely because Benn's script is so short and so limited; it is painfully obvious that he has been instructed not to mention George W Bush's tenure in office, and consequently any interviewer worth his salt is able to jab a well-placed knife into Benn's nethers and twist, while the less that is said of Benn's confused defence of a "long-established principle" regarding intelligence gathered from torture the better.

In truth, this embarrassing display is just another symptom of a government in terminal decline; Benn went forward to be interviewed without really knowing what he was talking about and not caring enough to find out. However, crucially, as a politician nurtured by New Labour's culture of spin and control-freakery, he lacked the imagination or the self-reliance to give even an excuse of an answer without falling back on endless repetition of the same pathetic dictum. These rats don't have the guts to swim; they're going to cling to the sinking ship.