He who is tired of London is tired of life. He who is tired of politics may be tired of life or may just care rather more about other things. For reasons of self-interest and self-importance, this thought does not seem to have occurred either to Britain's politicians or to the broadcasting panjandrums who are responsible for the BBC'S political programmes. Both of these attention-seeking castes are in a panic about the dwindling public appetite for their wares. And they are having a strangely circular argument about who is to blame for it. The argument goes something like this. The politicians say that citizens are being turned off politics by the cynicism of the media. Whereupon the BBC looks into ways of making its political coverage more appealing. Whereupon the politicians warn the BBC, whose purse-strings they control, not to "dumb down" its programmes. Whereupon the BBC grumbles, sotto voce, that the politicians have only themselves to blame for making politics a turn-off. In Britain, goes the grumble, politicians have pulled off the impressive feat of making politics look cynical, boring, dumbed-down and irrelevant-all at the same time.
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