Have you noticed how on children’s television the presenters never actually come into contact with the kids? They beam at them like half-wits, while showing them how to build simple wind farms or recycling plants or mosques out of crepe paper and organic yoghurt pots – but they never touch them. I suppose this is because parents across the country might take them for wrong ’uns and immediately phone Esther Rantzen’s hugely successful ChildLine. Apparently there are paedophiles lurking behind every privet hedge. It thus follows that anyone who wants to work in children’s TV must be a bit suspect, not quite right. Ditto Scout leaders, all youth workers, teachers, parents and so on. There’s a fine study out last week from the think tank Civitas, written by the reformed commie Frank Furedi, called Licensed to Hug, which makes the excellent point that this overprotectiveness is “poisoning” the relationship between adults and children. Furedi says that 11.3m people in this country will need to be vetted by the Criminal Records Bureau if they intend to work with children – a staggering invasion of privacy and personal liberty. However, this bureaucratic mechanism doesn’t work because it removes the crucial element of personal judgment. If someone turns up for a job working with children, he will be taken on so long as he has the requisite piece of paper from the CRB – even if he is wearing a stained raincoat, concealing a bag of lemon bonbons in his right hand and sweating slightly. Voluntary groups say many fewer people wish to involve themselves in children’s activities as a result.

A friend of mine, who takes 8 to 11-year-olds for football training, was vetted, along with about 15 similarly public-minded individuals. He recalled with grim weariness the rozzer saying to them threateningly, as they stood in a line: “Three of you lot are probably paedophiles. We don’t know who you are yet, but we’ll find out.” Why would anyone buta paedophile wish to put themselves through such humiliation? My mate was also told: never, ever, allow yourself to be alone with a child. Parents will be familiar with school sports days and the requirement for mums and dads to sign a register if they wish to take photographs of their children coming last in the sack race.

We have kidded ourselves that this snooping, mistrustful interference is necessary because we love our children and will do anything to prevent harm from coming to them – certainly, that’s Rantzen’s view. But there is a good case for saying that it is a consequence of the precise opposite: that while our kids are an agreeable accessory, one shouldn’t be expected to take full responsibility for them – it can be franchised out to the suspicious eyes of the state.

The BBC which was once, according to the former director-general Greg Dyke, “hideously white” has now become equally hideously black. Samir Shah, an executive director of the corporation, accused the BBC of “rampant tokenism” in stuffing its programmes with truckloads of ethnic minorities – and he didn’t just mean Crimewatch. Too often, dramas and soaps have a few ethnics bunged in them to keep up the important “black count”, regardless of whether they are of any relevance to the plot. Quite often the wrong ethnics, too, as Shah jubilantly pointed out. This derives from guidelines and targets laid down by the BBC’s legions of “diversity” staff – the same people who once told me, when I was an editor, that I should put more stories on the radio which showed Africa in a “positive light” instead of all this “stereotypical” stuff about famine, genocide and tyrants. So, forget Darfur and Zimbabwe – here’s some happy black people playing their drums or feeding goats.

Samir, as you may have guessed from the name, is of Indian descent, and cannot abide the pointless political correctness towards ethnic minorities, which he believes has been foisted on the viewing public by the BBC’s white, liberal, public-school elite. Well said – make this man director-general right now. And a prize for the first white BBC employee to make the same sort of point . . .

Andy’s up for a game of tetchiness

Must admit I’m beginning to warm to Andy Murray, the petulant Scotch Anglophobe who, with evident distaste, has been flying the flag for Britain in world tennis since that nice Tim Henman bowed out. His attitude, during press conferences, is that of a 14-year-old who has been told to clean his room out and smarten himself up a bit before grandma arrives to stay; surly, monosyllabic and patently resentful. He seems scarcely more enamoured of his whimpering and whooping hordes thronging the old “Henman Hill” at Wimbledon – now renamed the Great Murray Depression – than he does of the England football team, whom he once said he hoped lost every game they played. He’s not that enamoured of his hard-core supporters, either – having sent his lawyers in to one Murray fan website to threaten them against using copyrighted pictures of their hero, which is almost the definition of overkill. Occasionally abusive to umpires, always fairly arrogant on court in that horrible, clenched-fisted, triumphalist American sort of way, he seems absolutely determined to estrange anyone who catches sight of him. Which, in a Naomi Campbell sort of way, is rather refreshing.

Those gold-plated corgis must wait, ma’am

Anyone got a few quid to spare? The Queen, apparently, is skint. She can’t afford to redecorate her home because her renovation budget has been frozen for years. I think they wanted to put in a communal hot tub, some decking for the patio and one of those wall-length mirrors with a giant swan etched onto it, a naked woman riding on its back. And Artex a few ceilings and maybe turn the great hall at Windsor into a giant bar-cum-chill-out room, with beer pumps topped by humorous gold-plated corgis. Now it will all have to wait. She gets only £40m a year from the taxpayer. A lot of that is spent on trips enabling her to look delighted at Aborigines waving their bottoms in her face. In the end she’s left with about the same amount of taxpayers’ money for her home as Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper. Still, republican or monarchist, you must agree that she might have chosen a more judicious moment to plead for a bung from the public purse; they still haven’t quite got the hang of public relations, the royals, have they?

Both the following people are foreigners with criminal convictions who wish to be in Britain: one is considered a threat to the fabric of our society and will not be allowed in, while we’re so worried about the other one that we pay out nearly £50,000 a year in benefits. You have to guess which is which. The first is American Martha Stewart, the “domestic goddess” who served five months in prison for “obstructing justice” over share dealing, whose books have given pleasure to millions. The other is a Jordanian, Abu Qatada, sentenced to life in his own country for terrorism and described in a British court as being “at the centre in the UK of terrorism activity”. Tough one, isn’t it?

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