Jasmine Lawrence, senior BBC figure, attacks UKIP

Meet Mrs Jasmine Lawrence (43) who is the editor of the BBC News Channel. In case you are wondering, a BBC editor is not the person who edits anything in the traditional sense, it is someone who heads a programme, department or in the case of Jasmine Lawrence, damn near a whole channel.

Yesterday, Jasmine had one of those funny turns that people sometimes get and was inspired to tweet this to the world and his wife:

Now we all have bad days, but when a senior BBC figure like this makes a fatuous comment like that it acts to discredit the whole of the BBC and provides ammunition to those people who want to see Britain's broadcaster sold off to the likes of Rupert Murdoch. Has this stupid woman no idea of the damage that she has caused? She has deleted her Twitter account, but guess what? This is the World Wide Web and everything gets archived.

She may argue that she does not like UKIP, and I could argue that I don't like bottle blondes, but the difference between us is that this blog is my toy and I can say what I like on it. Jasmine Lawrence is a senior figure who belongs to an organisation that can only survive because people believe that it is impartial. Well that went out the window yesterday didn't it?

I can understand why la Lawrence had her funny turn. She enjoys a fat salary and lives in a £475,000 house in Henley-Upon-Thames, a fabulously wealthy district of London. She is of the class that hires the cheap nannies and even cheaper plumbers that globalisation has allowed into our country. Globalisation is no threat to our Jasmine: the cheap labour it provides to people like her allows them to live an even more luxurious lifestyle than they would do otherwise. All her friends are of a similar ilk, so their values begin to be seen as common sense, the views of everyone in other words.

However, they are not the values of everyone, are they? They are the values of a small, powerful, metropolitan clique who are trying to force the rest of us into either accepting those values, or terrify us by incredibly illiberal laws into silence.

In the short term this will just serve to increase the UKIP vote as people stick two fingers up to Jasmine and types like her. As for the stupid woman herself, I suspect that her position at the BBC is now untenable, but she is hardly likely to end up on the dole as one of her ilk will create a cushy number for her elsewhere in the media.

What worries me is the long-term damage that her stupidity has done to the BBC that I still want to respect and admire.

Congratulations to Guido Fawkes, who broke the story first.