Question Nick Griffin Time

Well apparently the BBC's viewing figures for Question Time were high Thursday. Having watched the show on view again I have a few comments on the show.

I have not seen much of Nick Griffin before, and ignoring what he actually says, he is not a very impressive politician, He did not appear in control of his facts, figures and ideas. In short, he had not mastered his brief. He looked like a fairly new local council backbencher, and was largely out of his depth. When faced with a difficult point his default response was to smile, laugh or use an inane grin. This suggests, erronously or not, that he does not have an answer. Again I stress my comment is more on his performance rather than what he said.

Griffin is no Oswald Mosely, Enoch Powell or even Alf Garnett.

David Dimbleby did I feel stray beyond the normal role of impartial Chair, and some of the most effective put-downs came from him, such as the "why are you smiling about the holocaust" comment he made. To be honest the panel was not that brillant. Chris Huhme was perfectly decent, but very grey and a bit anonymous. Jack Straw, in my mind got it wrong. He came across as all sound bite. Whatver, we might say, Griffin did have one high-ranking card in his hand, namely the perception (if not the reality) that immigration is rising significantly. What is slightly amusing is that the person who played that card the best was not Griffin. Rather, Baroness Warsi put Straw onto the back foot on the issue, and her comment of "you are in denial" struck home. For me the best panelist was the American-born non-politician Bonnie Greer, she used humour, detail and rational argument to pull apart Griffin's rhetoric. There was something rather ironic about Bonnie giving a Cambridge history graduate a lesson about the history of the British Isles.

That said I am not sure the BBC got the format right. As noted in the title it was not Question Time, rather it was questioning Nick Griffin time. I suspect this might have been the wrong approach. That said, I have spoken to several people not normally interested in politics and they all saw the prgramme live or later, and if it has led to more interest in politics that can be no mean thing.

There has been a lot of public wailing and gnashing of teeth over this programme (not least from the BNP themselves), but I very much doubt that the viewers of this programme are the real BNP target.