Littlejohn BBC Fishing Rant

It is rare indeed that the Daily Mail’s unfunny and talentless churnalist Richard Littlejohn is commanded by his legendarily foul mouthed editor to respond to yesterday morning’s Today programme – after all, Dick needs his beauty sleep, and he’s five time zones away in Florida – which makes today’s attack on a guest who inconvenienced Iain Duncan Cough so unusual.

Rebecca, Guv? She's got a funny accent, innit?!?

In his rant, Littlejohn’s frustrations, prejudices and victimhood complex come together as he vents his spleen, as ordered by Paul Dacre, at the hated BBC, and its “relentless Left-wing propaganda juggernaut”, which means more people trust the Beeb than the Mail, not that either Dick or Dacre can get it into their heads that the reason for this might be because they are so persistently dishonest.

“Meet the BBC’s poster girl for welfare ‘cuts’” froths the headline. Littlejohn and his boss are angry that the Corporation has given away so little information about Rebecca, as they have called her, that they cannot track her down – and thereby administer the usual hatchet job, to question her credibility and rubbish her testimony. The frustration in Littlejohn’s scribbling is clear for all to see.

And he does his best to suggest that Rebecca is not entitled to claim benefits: “She sounded African ... My guess is that Rebecca was  conjured up from central casting  by a researcher with one of the  myriad Left-wing ‘anti-cuts’ groups on speed dial. She was specially selected to prove that the Tories aren’t just heartless, they’re racist, too” says the pundit who guesses ethnicity from someone’s voice.

You think I jest? As the man said, there’s more: “when did Rebecca come to Britain? Where, exactly, did she come from? Is she an asylum seeker, or an economic migrant? On what grounds was she given the right to settle here? Did she have any children before she came to Britain or were they born here? London is a big city. Where, precisely, does she live?”

Perhaps Dicky Boy can provide a form for her and the Beeb to fill in. And then he can explain why he is pushing the narrative that Rebecca was not born in the UK, and suggesting that she may be one of those asylum seekers that his paper has been using to frighten readers for decades, all the while not being in the least racist. He might then explain how the interview “broke every rule of basic journalism”.

Then his editor can explain why he is searching for Rebecca, with the sole purpose of trashing her reputation, just so he can put one over on the BBC. Meanwhile, that Duncan Cough was reduced to talking merely in terms of his “belief” in the efficacy of his “benefit cap” is not told. That any of those, by definition, fine and upstanding ministers have not come up to scratch can never be told to the readers.

Littlejohn has inadvertently shown just how sick and frightened Paul Dacre really is.