Thank goodness!

April 1st has come and gone, so when I write:

Guess what today's Dateline London discussed for the umpteenth week in a row? Yes, Donald Trump - and someone called him "a brute"!...

...it's not a joke. This really did happen today. 

And this happened as well: 

During the opening discussion of the Cameron government's difficulties and the crisis over the Tata steelworks at Port Talbot,  Gavin Esler brought up the subject of Brexit...

...and, yes, he really did ask pro-EU/anti-Brexit guest Annalisa Piras (Bill Emmott's co-writer, director and producer on the BBC's wildly controversial pro-EU/anti-Brexit The Great European Disaster Movie) a helpful anti-Brexit question....

Just a final point. The other thing that's interesting....it plays into the European debate in all kinds of ways...but one of the issues raised about the EU debate and Britain's membership is this issue of sovereignty. And when faced with massive world economic factors, globalised trade, world trade organisations and so on, I wonder what degree of sovereignty any nation actually has in running its own affairs?

And she replied:

Exactly. That's a very, very important point.

And then she expanded on it. 

Though Gavin, to be fair, put some counter-points to her, he also let her finish with an anti-Brexit swipe and then changed the subject:

Gavin Esler: OK. Well, we're not going to do Brexit this week.

Rachel Shabi: Thank goodness!

Gavin Esler: Thank goodness! We are going to do Donald Trump however.

Rachel Shabi: Oh!

On the Port Talbot story:

Steve Richards of the Independent described the Conservatives as "ideological"; Rachel Shabi of the Guardian called them "ideological", "neo-liberal", "cruel", "out of touch" and "slightly creepy"; and Annalisa Piras called them "cruel", "not caring" and "the nasty party"...all of which is the obvious consequence of having a panel heavily weighted towards the Left (a recurrent Dateline London). 

Even the self-proclaimed "instinctive free-marketeer" John Fisher Burns of The New York Times blamed successive British governments for not supporting industry and not having an industrial policy and said that the usual "loony"-sounding Jeremy Corbyn sounded "credible" this week.

They may be right, they may be wrong. But having a proper right-winger on the programme would have helped, both balance-wise and interest-wise. It's not enough just to have Janet Daley or Alex Deane on every four or five weeks (fine though they are).