In 2000 little Victoria Climbié, eight years old, was murdered by her guardians, having endured months of appalling abuse and cruelty. You may remember the harrowing court case, Lord Laming’s subsequent inquiry, the trenchant criticisms of Haringey social services for their “blinding incompetence”. Victoria came from the Ivory Coast and arrived here in the custody of her “great-aunt”.

Last week Victoria’s natural mother, Berthe, was in the country to berate Britain for having failed to look after her daughter. She was treated with due reverence by everyone she spoke to and was commended for her “bravery” and ”dignity”. Never more so than on the BBC’s Today programme, where – quite unchallenged – she attacked social workers, councils and the government for having failed to implement the correct procedures in the wake of her daughter’s death.

Maybe Today felt unable to ask one or two more difficult questions, such as where a more direct responsibility for Victoria’s murder lies. So, as a former editor of the programme, let me point Today in the right direction with some of the questions I would have asked.

When you cheerfully handed over your own daughter for keeps to an almost complete stranger, a convicted fraudster who, with your blessing, intended to take her out of the country – did any money change hands, Berthe? If so, do you have a receipt? Is giving away your child to a fraudster recommended in the Ivory Coast Good Parenting Guide? And when you say that she came to Britain to make a better life for herself and contribute to Britain, was it a good idea for her to arrive here illegally on a false passport in the custody of a criminal guardian? According to you, there is a “tradition” among west African parents of sending children to Britain to “better themselves”. Isn’t it more the case that these children are shipped in as a lucrative investment, enabling their guardians to mop up all available child welfare benefits?

Did you ever visit your daughter while she was here, Berthe? Write her a letter? Maybe telephone from time to time? Did you even know that she was in Britain? (That loving “great-aunt” took her to France at first.) Certainly there were terrible mistakes made by the social services, mainly because they wished to respect the cultural integrity of west African immigrants with their tradition of, er, “strict discipline” of children. And that other tradition, of a bit of witchcraft and torture. When it comes down to it, though – who bears the greater responsibility for Victoria’s terrible death: British society or you?

We have a tendency here to indulge those who have lost children and other loved ones in horrible circumstances. Mostly this is fine, even commendable. In the case of Mohamed al-Fayed, it has proved hugely expensive. In the case of Berthe Climbié, it is repugnant.

Chalk one up for the concept of transparency. Determined to prove that it is as smug, middle class, vacuous, public school and left-wing as its critics allege, BBC’s Question Time has taken to including on its panel each week a smug, middle-class, public-school, vacuous and left-wing employee or former employee of the corporation.

A few weeks back it was the BBC “anticomedian” – that means he’s not remotely funny; just incredibly pleased with himself – Marcus Brigstocke (King’s Bruton). The week before last we had the pious, handwringing former head of news Tony Hall (Birkenhead school), whom I well remember – without enormous happiness – from my time in the corporation. And last Thursday it was the extraordinarily empty Dan Snow (St Paul’s), son of the broadcaster Peter and a great-great-grandson of Lloyd George, telling us all that knife crime was a terrible problem but that prison didn’t work, okay, yah? We should, like, get these juvenile stabbers to do something, you know, constructive.

Good point, Dan. Maybe they could use their knives to whittle us a new generation of liberally inclined public-school boys to staff the BBC in the future. Out of ash, because of its high density. Why, in a supposed meritocracy, are these people still on our television screens – because of their brilliance?

Boris shows his true colours

So, Boris Johnson, mayor of London, what is it exactly that first attracted you to the beautiful Asian babe Munira Mirza? The gorgeous, pouting recusant Muslim Munira was the surprise choice to become Boris’s official arts and culture supremo on a salary of £80,000 a year.

But this insinuation of mine is unfair, because apparently she is also a very clever creature, a former member of the influential Manifesto Club and possessed of an independent mind-set – too much cultural diversity is, she says, divisive; furthermore, racism in Britain is overstated. Boris has also appointed the Caribbean head teacher Ray Lewis to the post of deputy mayor; he is a social conservative with firm views on discipline for kids.

These two appointments seem to me a perfect example of “affirmative” antiracism: black or Asian people promoted on the basis of their own talents or achievements. As opposed to the quintessentially racist view of Boris’s predecessor, which is that our ethnic minorities are an undifferentiated morass, defined by their objection to the imperialist cultural hegemony and by the sad fact that they are not white.

Boris has said that he looks forward to working with Munira in the coming months. So would I, mate, so would I.

A beastly business, this sex malarkey

Scientists have discovered the fossilised remains of a weird, misshapen, shark-type creature that, some 375m years ago, was the first vertebrate to have sex “for fun”.

Somehow they have deduced from this piece of crumbly rock that the animal actually copulated in a Prescott-like manner, perhaps over a table in the office of the deputy prime minister after a few convivial drinks, rather than merely attempted to spawn in water (as many of us do, from time to time). Ergo, it enjoyed itself and maybe had a cigarette afterwards. And then quietly left the next morning, at five o’clock, scurrying for the train and ridden with guilt.

Having observed animals in the wild, especially foxes, it has never occurred to me that they have sex for fun – out of spite, perhaps, or just a base primal urge. They never look happy afterwards. I have always felt a far greater kinship with the nematode worm, which, when gripped by sexual frenzy, is inclined to stab itself to death with its own penis. A metaphor for many of us.

The witless doggerel of that Medusa-haired terminal smackhead Amy Winehouse has been recognised by Cambridge University. English literature undergraduates were invited, in their end-of-year exams, to compare Winehouse’s musings on the subject of love with a lyric poem by Sir Walter Raleigh. Cambridge academics say this is to show that they “live in the modern world”. Oh, you sad monkeys: all of us – even your poor wives – know you do.

Alexander Pope had the best possible riposte to unpoets of the likes of Winehouse: “Maggots half-formed in rhyme exactly meet / And learn to crawl upon poetic feet.” But then Pope wasn’t part of the exam this year.

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