LONDON, 28 January 2004 — The least reticent of Englishmen, the sometime Labour MP, Robert Kilroy-Silk, used to dream of becoming Britain’s prime minister. And ultimately he became a prime minister of sorts: The PM of British daytime television. His enforced resignation from the program last Friday, in the wake of the furor precipitated by his much-publicized anti-Arab outburst in the Sunday Express, may not have spelled the end of his television career, but it is certainly the end of his lucrative, 17-year relationship with the BBC.

Given to tackling lifestyle and relationship issues, Kilroy! was noisy stuff. But if the show generated more heat than light, its host was adept at managing his audiences. Indeed, in the best tradition of BBC impartiality, he gave a convincing impression of being an even-handed moderator, a professional presenter concerned to promote balanced debate and skilled at arbitrating between the often extreme opinions voiced by his programs’ participants. Even the most attentive among the show’s 1.2 million viewers would have been hard-pressed to guess that in private Kilroy-Silk nurses some decidedly strong, not to say positively nasty, views of his own: That, for instance, as he once disclosed in a newspaper column, he considers Ireland to be a country of “priests, peasants and pixies”, and that, as he confided to readers of the Sunday Express, he believes the Arab world comprises so many despots, suicide bombers and limb-amputators.

The truth is that, for all his sense of himself as a controversy-mongering people’s tribune, Kilroy-Silk was widely seen as a merchant of blandness. So it is ironic that the headline-grabbing circumstances of his downfall have provoked much challenging public discussion — about, among other things, such fundamental issues as freedom of speech and the responsibilities of public service broadcasting. It could be said that the debate that has raged in the British media since the publication of Kilroy-Silk’s Arabophobic sentiments has amounted to a genuinely interesting and useful edition of Kilroy, one which has raised vital questions and which, unlike the empty blather over which Kilroy-Silk normally presided, will not quickly be forgotten.

To the great mass of British people, the issue of freedom of speech is emotive in the extreme. It is seen as the very essence of everything that Britain has stood for — though it is striking how often disputes over the issue turn, as in the present case, on the right of the Englishman to be as abusive as he likes about foreigners. Loud in his professions of patriotism, Kilroy-Silk himself is much given to recalling how his own father died in World War II in the cause of defending free expression. Those who leapt to Kilroy-Silk’s defense over the past two weeks, as great numbers of people did, argue that the BBC betrayed that hallowed principle and acted with indecent haste in suspending Kilroy! the moment it became plain that the presenter’s attack on Arabs had caused widespread outrage. There have also been furious claims — from Jews and others — that the BBC has exposed itself to the charge of double standards.

It must be said that the BBC has some reason to feel hypersenstive to criticism at present, faced as it has been during recent months with the allegation that it falsely accused the British government of doctoring intelligence and that it let its defense correspondent, Andrew Gilligan, write sensational newspaper articles. Even among Kilroy-Silk’s detractors, there are some who believe that the BBC is guilty of pusillanimity. They argue that the corporation ought to have upheld the principle that Kilroy-Silk had a right to vent his views, however odious, and that such views are better expressed rather than suppressed, since more harm than good is likely to be done by driving them underground. It has even been suggested that the publication of Kilroy’s crass, ill-informed comments has yielded paradoxical benefits, for in the endless coverage of them much has been said about his seemingly total ignorance of the Arab world and its achievements. Journalists have taken great pleasure in mocking his failure to grasp what an enormous amount modern civilization owes to Arab initiatives.

What this intellectual libertarianism blinks, however, is the fact that it is neither desirable nor practicable for a talk show host on a public service broadcasting network, whose audience draws on all sections of Britain’s multiracial society, to be known to harbor prejudices against particular ethnic groups: In the aftermath of the uproar caused by Kilroy-Silk’s intemperate article his authority as a fair-minded presenter was going to be impossible to sustain. In this sense, he occupied a very different position from that of Paulin, whose involvement with the BBC is in the capacity of a professionally opinionated contributor to a late night television show. Paulin is paid to be an intellectual provocateur — though as a writer and poet he could perhaps be expected to refrain from issuing incitements to murder in whatever public context he might be speaking.

Not that the BBC can be entirely absolved of subscribing to double standards, or at the very least of being inconsistent. Once again, its executives have ended up looking inept — all the more so because, as it turned out, Kilroy-Silk’s offending article had been published on a previous occasion without incurring the BBC’s odium (or anybody else’s). The entire episode has been especially unfortunate in that it has played straight into the hands of sworn enemies of the corporation. It is, from this point of view, tempting to suspect that the Kilroy-Silk controversy was cunningly contrived with the deliberate aim of undermining the BBC and promoting the case for a free market in broadcasting.

Dr. Johnson observed that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Refuges of scoundrels — scoundrels with hidden business agendas — the newspapers of Murdoch and Desmond may be.

As organs of ultrafervent British patriotism, however, the Daily and Sunday Express can at least lay claim to time-honored credentials. During the middle decades of the twentieth century, under the ownership of the great Canadian Anglophile, Lord Beaverbrook, both were staunch for the British empire; to this day, their mastheads bear the image dear to Beaverbrook — that of a crusader clad in chain mail and brandishing a spear and a shield emblazoned with the cross of St George. How fitting that the anti-Arab Kilroy-Silk should be associated with a newspaper which commemorates the time when Englishmen set out to rescue the Middle East from darkness.