Watch David Aaronovitch talking to Daniel Finkelstein

All right, by the unspoken rules of the game I probably behaved badly. It’s been happening increasingly often, but this was in front of several hundred thousand people, the occasion being an edition of the BBC’s Daily Politics programme last Friday.

The show has a magazine format, in which two commentators are retained throughout, and asked for their brief opinions on a variety of subjects.

I knew from Tom, the jolly researcher, that the topics would be Blair’s bad week, Lords reform and a poll that the programme had conducted on the question of tax. When I turned up, my fellow guest turned out to be an elegant, rather nice-looking woman from the Daily Mail who I had never heard of before. Oy.

So the show’s host does an intro and we’re into Tony Blair’s interview on the BBC that morning. What did we think of it? The woman from the Mail is off and, by the time I’ve drawn breath, is halfway round the dirt-track. Blair showed himself to be “delusional”, mad as a hatter, circling Earth in a wobbly capsule while dribbling. Not only that but he had said he “didn’t care” what the British people thought. And I knew, this is not going to be a discussion. This is declamation.

I say the Mail headline of “Labour Meltdown” is an exaggeration.

“”Labour spin!” retorts the Mail lady, and the red mist descends. I don’t do spin, I say, and — unlike Mail writers — I am not told by my editors what to write. On Lords reform I try and talk about the problems of second chambers and checks and balances, but the Mail lady isn’t having any of that. The taxpayer, she declaims, doesn’t want to pay for any more preening politicians. That’s the sum total of her thinking on the subject. I splutter.

The final item concerns John Prescott who admits to being “demob happy”. Is Mail lady sorry to see him go? By now you can predict the contents of her next grab-bag of pronouncements. Prescott has never done anything good, has always been a waste of space, taking the pay and doing no work and so on. By now I am completely unhorsed by her adamantine negativity. To me she is like the thing from Alien, her structural perfection matched only by her hostility. I say so.

One problem was my anger. I had an idea of the sort of debate one might have on a programme such as this, involving strong opinions, certainly, but also the possibility of enlightenment. And I was coping badly with the gulf between the hope and the reality. In fact I felt obliterated by it.

I should have, as the Americans say, just “sucked it up”. My coguest was essentially only a spoken version of her paper, in which all ministers are hopeless, taxpayers are being squeezed, public services are in simultaneous crisis, epidemics are imminent and have been badly handled and women falsely cry rape. A paper that is impervious to discussion or nuance and in which each necessary article is bent or altered towards this one conclusion, that Britain — once great — is now a toilet, and that Britons — once free — have been betrayed.

As I once did with Abu Hamza, I want to think that all this is funny — it’s just a newspaper. When its readers get a front page reading “The Big Issue. Prisons full . . . NHS in crisis . . . more soldiers dying . . . inflation and bank rates up . . . So what was obsessing our political leaders yesterday? The Big Brother racism row”, alongside huge photos of Jade Goody and Shilpa Shetty and the promise of several more pages on the inside, I want to believe that they see the hypocrisy and understand that the politicians are not the ones who are obsessed.

Maybe they see that, given the discipline of his titles, there was something wonderful about the Mail Editor Paul Dacre’s attack on the BBC a few days ago. The corporation, he charged, “exercises a kind of cultural Marxism where it tries to undermine [an essentially] conservative society by turning those values on their head”. It’s true that the prevailing ethos at the Beeb is liberal, but since the organisation is not run like the Falange, that very liberalism allows all kinds of other discussions to take place. Which was why I found myself involved in a fruitless and sterile conversation with one of Dacre’s xenomorphs.

The irony is that the Mail, on the other hand, has a party line that makes Lenin look like Ming Campbell. Dacre is a famous dirigiste, a saloon-bar Trotskyist, a golf-club Stalin. Go and look at the website at www.mailwatch.co.uk and see if you don’t agree.

This all might not matter if he weren’t so acute and ruthless at setting the agenda. But increasingly the BBC itself, where most journalists seem to read either The Guardian or the Mail, have taken on the storylist and the tone of the Mail. You could call it high Dacreage. Back on Daily Politics last week the second item was the Friday poll. Respondents had been asked to react to various statements, we were told. The first was “I feel better off today than I did a few years ago”. 53 per cent agreed, 47 per cent disagreed. Next we had: “The Government is to blame for people feeling worse off financially”, with which 61 per cent agreed.

I sat there, incredulous, as these figures were reported as being bad news for the Government. Did the results, for example, mean that the Government should take the blame for the 47 per cent, but could take credit for the 53 per cent? These results, on their own, were meaningless, but they were never questioned. It was a Mail headline in a BBC studio.

I know from the letters page of this newspaper that some readers consider any sort of suggestion that Britain isn’t in meltdown to be, as one correspondent described me, “Panglossian” (after Voltaire’s complacent character who considered that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds). But in a country where, as The Economist pointed out this week, GDP per head has overtaken France and Germany, and which has the second-lowest unemployment figures in the EU, it seems perverse and dangerous to begin the discussion on what now needs to be done from the untrue premise that most things are dysfunctional.

Forget Pangloss, dear reader, our real enemy is his Dacrean cousin, Dr Pandreck. Embrace him and his box of false sighs, and we will head down the road to isolation, xenophobia and protectionism.

All of which I should have said much better on Friday.

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