As they became more desperate, so the contents moved further away from current affairs and further into tabloid storyland. I saw them fail, as they have always failed.And I decided that – while it was possible to do current affairs well, and to try to entertain your audience – youth current affairs was a chimera Young people just don’t watch current affairs. I didn’t, not even when I was President of the National Union of Students.Preparing for my first interview for a job with Weekend World in 1982, I realised that – though I was well aware of the programme’s reputation – I had never actually seen it before.When rumours of BBC plans to cut down on political coverage first hit parliament, the chairmen of both the Labour and Conservative parties wrote to the new chairman, Gavyn Davies. “We will not,” he reassured them, “be reducing the volume of political programming or the amount of money we spend on them…

no one at the BBC has any desire to reduce or ‘dumb down’ our political coverage.”Really? Things have changed a lot in the last seven years then, because I recall a continual struggle against channel controllers to keep current affairs anywhere in the schedules – and that was in the days of the serious John Birt. So Mr Davies’s subsequent warning that the style of coverage might change in order to attract “new” viewers, should be treated with reserve.There is no greater weasel phrase in TV than “current affairs doesn’t have to be boring” – usually followed by an encomium to programmes like MacIntyre Undercover which, whatever their other virtues, simply aren’t current affairs. Consumer programmes on dodgy car dealers aren’t current affairs either, though the BBC now classifies them as such. The BBC cannot claim to have “popularised” current affairs, if what it has really done is to refuse to address any issue of complexity.For a long time now BBC politics staff (some of whom have indeed been over-immersed in the trivia of Westminster gossip) have known that their programmes are about to be axed. What neither they or we yet know, despite the passage of time, is what is to replace them.I hope that we are not in for a short-lived gimmicky, youth-obsessed, ironic (and therefore cynical) set of shows, which will eventually die to be replaced by nothing. I think that what a Corporation, which collects the licence fee and is dedicated to the public service, ought to do is pretty straightforward.

Instead of all this bollocks about apathy and demographics and youth, the BBC ought to get its best journalists together, commission them to produce an excellent weekly current affairs show, resource it properly, give it a good slot and an excellent presenter, and tell them to do the best journalistic job they can and not worry about the ratings.The audience, of whatever size, would be grateful.. Readers of Nigel Dempster’s column in the Daily Mail may have been rather confused by an item the venerable diarist ran last Thursday. The story was that Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka was not going out with Nat Rothschild. While no doubt this is a missed opportunity for both parties, the fact that two people, not hitherto linked in the pages of the Daily Mail, are not an item is an unusual revelation for a gossip columnist to offer his readers. “The highly eligible Nathaniel Rothschild,” wrote Helliker, “has fallen head-over-heels in love with the daughter of the brash American property magnate Donald Trump.” But Dempster was not only rubbishing his former deputy; Helliker is shortly moving to the Mail on Sunday, where his picture by-lined diary column will be in competition with Dempster’s long- established page.How will they get along? When Helliker left Dempster’s employ a few years ago, their farewells became physical, and when I saw Helliker at a drinks party that evening he was sporting a fat lip. For his part, Dempster has said: “I do not remember punching him, but in self defence it is possible that his mouth came into contact with my body in some way.” However, such affectionate gestures have a long and honourable tradition among diarists, “especially,” as one senior columnist points out, “after lunch”.Because of his prominent position and unrivalled longevity, Dempster has been part of many of these disputes, particularly with his opposite numbers at the Daily Express. For many years in the Eighties and Nineties, he traded insults with Ross Benson, then diary editor at the Express.

Dempster referred to Benson, quite a peacock, in his column as “the pompadoured poltroon”, while Benson called the balding Dempster “the tonsured traducer”. Despite this seeming levity, the rivalry was taken seriously. When I worked for Benson I noticed that Dempster’s page was cut out and kept in a scrapbook every day as well as his own column, although Benson’s scribblings were preserved in a smarter book, naturally.Brutus, a more recent column in the Express started by Christopher Silvester, also raised Dempster’s blood pressure by calling the Greatest Living Englishman “a vile jelly”. Dempster was so angry that he attacked Silvester eight times in a month, labelling him variously a “lickspittle”, a “fawning creature” and “an anonymous creep”. At the same time Dempster informed his readers that the Express “sold 3.4 million copies a day more when I worked on it for the late Lord Beaverbrook”. He also took pains to mention that Silvester’s grandfather was the late bandleader Victor Silvester, a fact which Dempster evidently thought counted against him.Dempster’s biggest explosion of recent years was against John McEntee, Benson’s successor as the Express diarist.