The Media Column: How right-wing columnists show their flagrant bias

It's been a complaint of the right since Roman times that only left-wingers get to work for the BBC. Why, they demand, is Polly Bragg of The Guardian allowed to present whole radio shows, while Genghis Tebbit of the Daily Mail is always overlooked?

It's nothing like 100 per cent true, of course, yet there is a sliver of justice in this whinge. The reason for this, I think, lies not so much in the liberal bias of broadcasters, but in the sometimes staggeringly partisan nature of right-wing journalists. To put it as bluntly as I can, lefties tend to be sceptics about their parties, right-wingers to be flag-carriers for their cause.

Let us try to imagine, for a moment, that our own Donald Macintyre were to write an article in the forthcoming New Statesman, following the weekend's large anti-war demonstration. In it he not only flings his blessings at the marchers as being a series of secular saints, but then goes on to excoriate those who were not there, who he thinks should have been. He names and shames Labour MPs, no-show celebrities, quango chiefs who should have turned up, journalists who failed to put in an appearance, and, all the while, questions the absentees' commitment to their country and their beliefs. He makes it clear that he regards attendance at this one event as, in effect, a qualifying condition for membership of the human race.

You can't envisage it. Even an imaginary general secretary of a putative Worker's Revolutionary League would get into big trouble if he used the pages of Proletarian Weekly to castigate members of the league personally for not getting their arses into gear and going on that march. Modern British Leninists will permit only so much interference from the centre before they rebel.

Turn to the right, and the unimaginable becomes real. The journalist Peter Oborne writes for various newspapers, including the London Evening Standard, where he is used as a "political commentator", not as a man of controversy. And this week Oborne wrote two pieces for The Spectator. One of which was exactly the column that the general secretary would not dare to publish, except that it was about those flinching cowards and sneering traitors who had not made it to the Liberty and Livelihood march. In The Times, the Spectator's editor, Boris Johnson MP, quipped that as the article was being researched (you can imagine the phone call), some of his Tory colleagues called him up, begging not to be named and shamed.

Oborne's piece was everything they must have feared. His heroes were people such as the "family from Saudi Arabia [who] flew into London for the march, and then straight back to the desert". Oborne then went on, "But there were villains as well: those from Britain who could not be bothered to do their bit. Men like Martin Pipe, Britain's champion National Hunt trainer. Pipe says that his leg is in plaster, but this did not prevent National Hunt jockey Richard Johnson from marching."

Yes, he really did write that, and I am as amazed as you are. It gets more extraordinary. After running through a list of such candidates for damnation, Oborne pontificates (a completely apt verb in this case): "Some of these people must realise that, if they are to live in and enjoy the glory of the British countryside, there is a reciprocal obligation." It is unfortunate (and, one hopes, a coincidence) that this national sentiment should be expressed immediately after a Mr Wafiq Said is taken to task. "Anglers were extremely poorly represented," Oborne continues, and the uninvolved National Trust, apparently, "should reflect that its purpose is to preserve and not demolish our magnificent national heritage, and ponder on its name."

Ironically, this brand of countryside Maoism was exactly the target of Rod Liddle, editor of the Today programme, in the now infamous Guardian column in which he said that some of the marchers reminded people of why they voted Labour in 1997. In his village, he had noticed the kind of petty victimisation to which some Lib-and-Lifers were subjecting non-marchers. I think it had stuck in his libertarian craw. Which, for a journalist, is the right kind of craw.

david.aaronovitch@btinternet.com