The BBC’s bias in favour of the legalisation of cannabis is great, growing and ought to be diminished. The Corporation is supposed to be impartial on major issues of public controversy, but on this subject it is rampantly partisan.

Your guess is as good as mine as to why this organisation, dominated as it is by London Left-wing metrosexuals, should be so one-sided on this issue.

I have tried to pursue formal complaints about the problem but have been rebuffed by the absurd system in which the BBC is judge and jury in its own cause, and has never done anything wrong.

The BBC’s bias in favour of the legalisation of cannabis is great, growing and ought to be diminished

Though I have written a book on the subject, I have never been invited by the BBC to discuss it. Yet, last week, the Corporation aired an astonishing programme in which the novelist Sarah Dunant was permitted to transmit ten minutes of uninterrupted pro-marijuana propaganda.

She did this on a programme called A Point Of View, which lives up to its name, though the point of view expressed is almost invariably a Left-liberal one. I once applied to be one of its presenters, and was granted a hilarious interview in which the BBC person was not actually wearing an ebola-resistant suit, but might as well have been, so chilly and awkward was the exchange.

It turned out (not to my surprise) that my point of view wasn’t the sort they wanted, thanks very much. The excuses were laughable. The real reason was obvious. Wrong opinions.

But they are happy with Ms Dunant who, cheerfully describing herself as an ‘old stoner’, confessed to having broken the law of England for 40 years (amazing as it may seem, possession of cannabis is still technically illegal), having been ‘using’ cannabis throughout her adult life.

This blithe, on-air revelation (broadcast twice on transmitters paid for by the legally enforced licence fee) followed an admiring description of the legalisation of this drug in various parts of the US as ‘a whole new flowering of the American dream’.

It was preceded by the usual ignorant rubbish, which dribbles ceaselessly from the lips of the fashionable, about a non-existent ‘war on drugs’ which she asserted ‘has not worked’.

I am not aware that she has ever been prosecuted for her 40 years of admitted law breaking, nor do I think she will be on this occasion, despite her public confession.

Does it occur to Ms Dunant, who I suspect of being a ‘public intellectual’, or to those who hire her and accept her work, to wonder how there can be a ‘war on drugs’ or ‘prohibition’ if she can confess on air that she has been breaking the criminal law for four decades, yet remains a respectable person, at liberty and much more welcome in the studios of the BBC than I am?

A dramatic glimpse of how Britain will rip itself to shreds

I have finally managed to see the clever drama King Charles III, now playing – with Robert Powell excellent in the title role – at Chichester’s Festival Theatre.

It really ought to be adapted for TV or the cinema. The author, Mike Bartlett, obviously loves Shakespeare and has learned a lot from him, especially from Macbeth, with its ghosts and a woman more ambitious, ruthless and cruel than any man (I won’t tell you who gets this role). And it left me more worried than I already was.

The plot involves a very possible clash between a future King Charles and the elected government over an issue – in this case press freedom – where the King speaks for the ancient liberties of England. The battle, featuring a slippery and double-faced Tory leader as comic relief, rips the country wide open very quickly. I think this is dead right. A very thin wrapping of civility and tolerance is stretched tighter and tighter across a country seething with division and mutual mistrust.

It will only take one major rip in the fabric for the whole thing to come flying apart.

I have finally managed to see the clever drama King Charles III, now playing – with Robert Powell (pictured) excellent in the title role – at Chichester’s Festival Theatre

Many people have missed the point of David Cameron’s attempt to bracket opponents of his latest war with ‘terrorist sympathisers’. It is this. Our Prime Minister (earlier than many) is beginning to suffer from Downing Street Disorder.

It starts with being unable to believe that anyone can possibly disagree with you, unless they are mad or wicked. It ends with being so cut off from the world that you are unable to make a phone call or use public transport.

The only cure is to be turned out of office, but many victims never fully recover.

Was Hilary's speech that great? All I heard was emotive piffle

The most miserable and dispiriting part of Wednesday’s war debate in Parliament was the number of MPs who were not embarrassed to read their pathetic ‘speeches’ from scripts which seemed to have been written by the Government whips.

Shouldn’t it be a minimum qualification for membership that you should be able to make a brief, coherent speech from the heart?

If Hilary Benn’s politically illiterate, factually challenged and emotive diatribe was a great speech, then we have indeed fallen on hard times

The trouble with these nonentities is that they don’t know or believe in anything, and have arrived in the Commons via a conveyor belt of ambition and flattery, quite unfitted to debate the future of a canning factory let alone the country or the world. I wonder how many of them chose to ignore the views of their constituents, accept the orders of Downing Street, and then pretended that they were speaking their own minds? And if Hilary Benn’s politically illiterate, factually challenged and emotive diatribe was a great speech, then we have indeed fallen on hard times.

I am not surprised that the Speaker, John Bercow, did not need to urinate throughout the long hours of drivel through which he had to sit. I expect the whole thing put him into a politically induced coma, and all his natural functions shut down.

A strange silence has followed an extraordinary allegation from former Lib Dem leader Lord (Paddy) Ashdown.

Lord Ashdown is, in general, a keen supporter of liberal intervention, and is careful about what he says, being a former soldier and a Privy Counsellor.

But a few days ago he said on BBC radio, while noting the feeble contribution of Gulf countries to the fight against Islamic State and to taking refugees: ‘The failure to put pressure on the Gulf States – and especially Saudi Arabia and Qatar – first of all to stop funding the Salafists and Wahhabists; secondly to play a larger part in this campaign, and other actions where the Government has refused to have a proper inquiry into the funding of jihadism in Britain, leads me to worry about the closeness between the Conservative Party and rich Arab Gulf individuals.’

I think this is an astonishing thing for a major politician to have said.