On Monday night, LBC invited me to be interviewed by Henry Riley about the state of UK prisons. It was a sensible and courteous interview, but then at the end came the ambush, so loved by a certain type of journalist. He asked if I was “driven mad by the sight of so many black and Asian people in TV ads”.
I steadfastly refused to talk about anything except prisons. He persisted. I said he could ask me 14 times a la Paxman, but he was going to get the same answer every time. It is an old trick.
After nine years out of practice, I fell for it on the Sophie Ridge show in 2019 when, having returned to politics, I was invited to talk about the future of the Brexit Party after its huge victory in the European elections.
Again, it all seemed perfectly reasonable until the last-minute ambush when Niall Patterson asked about my views on homosexuality. I made the mistake of answering. Cue a vast blast of media reaction, in which I could not recognise my own views.
So, sorry, Henry, but I have been back in politics for long enough to walk around rather than into a trap when it has been set.
If I had distanced myself from Sarah Pochin’s comments, the story would have been Reform rift. If I had supported Sarah, the story would have been that I was racist.
The Sarah Pochin pile-on cannot paper over the statistical facts. Reality is being distorted - Ann Widdecombe | Getty Images
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Print, however, is different, which is why I miss my old Daily Express page so much. So let me answer the question here.
A couple of years ago, a friend whom I had known since we were both students and parliamentary aspirants casually remarked that if all you had to go by was what was portrayed in TV adverts, then you would conclude that the majority of the population of Britain was in mixed marriages.
He is the last person to make any racist comment and, when he was an MP, went out of his way to engage with the ethnic minorities in his constituency. He was just stating a fact.
The statistical facts are simple enough: over 80 per cent of the UK population is white, and 90 per cent are not living with someone or married to someone from a different ethnic group.
According to the census, about four per cent of the population is black and under 10 per cent Asian. So, if there is a substantial over-representation of these minority groups in TV advertising, then that is obviously disproportionate and some would say even a distortion of social reality.
Also, a while ago now I received a query on my website about this very issue and I replied that I suspected the ad makers were trying to project a broad image across the population as a whole, because, whereas in big cities diversity and a mix of races are quite common, there are still parts of the country which are so predominantly white that a person from an ethnic minority stands out.
Perhaps the ad chappies were just trying to normalise something that would not raise an eyebrow in the metropolis.
However, I think it has gone well beyond that, when it can seem that almost the only adverts which feature white couples are for funeral services and travel insurance for the ailing elderly!
Nevertheless, Sarah’s choice of wording was poor, but I suspect that, however she had phrased it, a racism storm would have followed.
Yet we need to be able to comment on such issues. Healthy discussion promotes good race relations; simmering resentments do not. Our diversity-obsessed admen might want to ponder that.
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