The BBC's World Service is, as it has always been, funded by the Foreign Office. A simple fact, little known and often overlooked. There's no conspiracy theory that I know to talk about (although I'll bet plenty of people do), but when viewing a big issue like Iraq those historic ties may be significant. I'm sure that if the BBC and the 50 or so former diplomats had drafted the recent letter of protest together they could not have agreed more strongly in their views on Israel and Iraq. Greg Dyke is known to have thought that Blair was a traitor to his left-wing roots; I wonder if this is one of the ways he thought Blair was traitorous?

Not until you read Melanie Phillips' brilliant and excoriating attack on the Old Boys' letter do you see that it was just as well the BBC didn't mention too much of the detail of their arguments in their actual reports. By far the most impressive thing is that 52 former diplomats signed the thing, which gives Melanie reason to say 'The advanced state of Britain's utter moral bankruptcy is on vivid display'. Melanie's key point (as she quotes extensively and rebuts in detail), 'there is no law in the world which requires a state to sit on its hands while its citizens are murdered.', is surely the point, at which these mandarins of the faded Foreign Office appear to shrivel into nonentity like poisonous toads into the thick undergrowth of their own moral confusion. The BBC is quite right not to let the has-been diplomats' own words discredit them in their reports- it would be bad for The Cause.