Amanda Platell Refugee Paranoia

After the Murdoch goons at the Sun threw their toys out of the press pram in no style at all over unaccompanied refugee children being allowed into the UK, the inmates of the Northcliffe House bunker were clearly under orders from the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre to get in on the act, and to that end the paper’s Glenda Emeritus Amanda Platell has gone in with both feet on Gary Lineker - and of course the hated BBC.

The stuff of nightmares

Never mind that Ms Platell is a regular on such BBC programmes as The Andy Marr Show (tm), when Dacre orders his hacks to jump, the only question permitted in response is “how high”. So it came to pass that Mail readers were treated this morning to “Posturing Lineker is ignoring real child victims” which tells “How sadly predictable that oh-so right-on football pundit Gary Lineker felt compelled to comment on the controversy surrounding the ages of ‘child’ migrants arriving in Britain from the Calais Jungle camp”.

Yes, showing compassion and abhorring racist bigotry is now reduced to being “right-on”. And, sadly, there is more. “Is it asking too much of Lineker that he should stick to football and not, with unconscionable arrogance, sneer at the great majority of Britons who, incidentally, pay his vastly-inflated salary at the BBC - an organisation that is meant to be politically neutral”. He wasn’t sneering, Amanda. But you most certainly are.

And then she sells the pass: “The fact is that, over recent years, this country has welcomed millions of migrants”. Yes, Ms Platell - INCLUDING YOU. The difference, of course, is that Amanda Platell is white, and speaks English - well, after a fashion.

Still, on with the smearing: “They didn’t expect a bunch of swarthy, broad-shouldered young men, some looking to be in their 30s, who deliberately destroyed their identification documents … It costs councils an estimated £48,000 a year to look after each of these men with five o’clock shadows”. And guess what? It’s Mail readers paying for it.

Not only that, but “Inevitably, vulnerable children already in our social services system will not be getting the care they need as homes struggle to cope with this new influx”. This is more subtle than saying “send them back”, but no less insidious, as is the idea that Gary Lineker only behaved as he did because the dastardly Beeb made him: “Which brings me back to I’m-more-virtuous-than-you Gary Lineker, who is simply kowtowing to his politically correct bosses at the BBC”. Like Ms Platell doesn’t kowtow to Dacre, oh no.

But she holds back the utterly barking, paranoid pièce de résistance to the end. And what a screamingly gaga moment it is: “it was telling that, in its coverage of this week’s arrivals from Calais, BBC News - unlike newspapers - pixelated footage of the ‘children’ so that viewers couldn’t see their facial hair … Such disgraceful censorship exposes once again the Corporation’s Left-wing agenda”. THEY’RE PIXELLATED BECAUSE THEY’RE UNDER SIXTEEN YEARS OLD. Christ on a bike, this is a journalist writing this?

Amanda Platell is not merely a misinformed, intolerant, sneering and uncaring bigot - she’s also well and truly out to lunch. So ideal Daily Mail pundit material, then.