The BBC’s case for not showing the Disaster Emergency Committee’s Gaza appeal is based on its duty – especially in its international broadcasting guises – to report without partiality. Given the great value of their international services in providing unslanted news they do have a case in protecting their reputation for this, unpalatable though it seems in this instance. In practical terms, of course, their refusal to air the appeal has hugely heightened the public’s awareness of it and will increase the response to the appeals put out by the non-public broadcast channels. Much more sinister is the reason Sky News refused to air it. News Corp is dependent on the goodwill of US Bankers, which requires submission to the US Jewish lobby. We can only hope that President Obama has more courage than Mr Murdoch when it comes to confronting this powerful group.

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Anyone who’s spent a few hours in Ludlow will tell you it’s as handsome a town as you could find in Merry England (imagine all those parfit knights, codpieces and Black Death), stuffed with alleyways, timbered houses with oaken chins that jut over narrow streets and a fine castle built on a rocky mount above a gushing river. It still even has a suite of late-Georgian Assembly Rooms, as favoured by Ms J Austen and her sort when seeking social interaction. Despite being coloured an iffy crushed-blackcurrant-and-cream that Farrow & Ball must have been selling off cheap, the Assembly Rooms still serve their original function as a place of encounter and diversion in this small town. Last Saturday – a techno dance rave, next week – jazz rapper, Soweto Kinch. There are plays and concerts and other types of dances, although no White Sergeants dashing or otherwise engaged in cotillions or quadrilles or any of those high-waisted Regency dance routines where you barely have time to say, ‘Lah, me, Miss Jemma, you put me in mind of a frisky filly,’ before your partner hurls you into the solid bosom of a passing matriarch.

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Responding to a critic who had asked if the Press Complaints Commission was a ‘fig leaf’ to cover press misbehaviour, the current Chairman, Sir Christopher Meyer said, ‘It’s a load of bollocks.’

There, in a ‘nutshell’, is the truth about the PCC.

For Meyer went on to show his empathy with the Shag-Rags, over whom he is supposed to exercise control, by painting a picture of hard-nosed tabloid editors cowering behind their desks to protect themselves from the mighty wrath unleashed by the PCC when they have foolishly strayed from the path of righteousness.

I wish.

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There can be no doubt that editors at the News of the World knew exactly what they were doing when they illegally acquired and published a young army officer’s private and fairly mundane video record of his day-to-day experiences in the forces.

In it Prince Harry (who made the video) described one of his platoon, a friend and colleague, as “our little paki friend, Ahmed”, and the paper leapt at the chance to pile in and give him an almighty kicking – yet again.

Have a look at it on the Screws “family” website, if you can be bothered, and you’ll see it’s absolutely clear from the way the term is delivered that there is no malice, no implied racism, nothing to which the Pakistani soldier himself could or wanted to raise any objection.

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There was a time when Tony Blair’s voice was part of the background noise of this country. But since he spotted the danger ahead and deftly handed Gordon Brown the reins of the chariot of state as it hurtled towards the abyss, we have heard barely a squeak.

But where is he now, at a time when he should once again be strutting his stuff on the world stage? With a fresh, tragic crisis in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, there is no sound from the Representative of the “Quartet” of interested parties – UN, EU, Russia and the US – a post to which Blair was appointed in June 2007, and in which he has not achieved any perceptible initiatives.

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