His basic line of argument – that a national, tax-funded media organisation should take care to reflect the opinions of its nation – is pretty hard to refute, even for an unreconstructed auntie lover like me. But, true to form, he still repeatedly manages to make my lower jaw start wobbling in impotent fury.

I’ll give just two examples. First off, there’s the fact that the right-hand side of his face appears to come equipped with blinkers:

But let’s pose this question: what if a civic BBC finds itself dealing with an administration that does not behave in a civic way? An administration that manipulates news organisations and the news agenda, that packs ministry press offices with its supporters, that chooses good days to bury bad news, that favours news bodies that give it positive coverage and penalises those who don’t, that fabricates health and education figures…

These are all reasonably disgusting things for a government to go about doing. But – and admitting I’ve trimmed the quote to lose a couple of Blair-specific points – aren’t these exactly the kind of things the Thatcher government did in the eighties? You know, Bernard Ingham, Marmaduke Hussey, that kind of thing?

Come to that, despite Dacre swallowing the line about liberal media bias in the US, doesn’t the lack of criticism the Bush administration received during its first five years rather suggest that they, too, might have persuaded a pliant media to roll over and play dead?

And most of all, doesn’t the fact that we’ve all spent the past decade listening to constant complaints about Labour’s efforts to control the media suggest that, far from being the masters of spin, they’re actually appallingly bloody incompetent at it?

Even more annoying than this, though, is the ‘silent majority’ stuff. Some extracts:

How often do you hear, on the Today programme or Newsnight, contemptuous references to the tabloid or popular press as if it was some disembodied monster rather than the very embodiment of the views of the great majority of the British people…?”

…Over Europe, for instance, the BBC has always treated anyone who doesn’t share its federalism – which just happens to be the great majority of the British population…

…that political correctness has become an intolerant creed, enabling a self-appointed elite to impose its minority values on the great majority…

Lets get this straight. Dacre is criticising the Beeb for not recognizing the range of political opinion in Britain. And in order to bolster his cause, he refers repeatedly and without evidence, to the great conservative mass of the British people, who all silently nod along with his politics and style of journalism?

As much as I love the Beeb, and believe it provides a much needed liberal voice in a media that is increasingly dominated by the right, there is a good argument against funding it through tax. But by pretending to speak for the great mass of British people and ignoring past Tory spin, all Dacre does is highlight the fact that, when it comes to the media, the right play exactly the same game as the left.

Does the excitable publicity about the fact we just killed a guy worry anyone else?

It was a done deal from the beginning, it was a onesided relationship that was entered into with open eyes… there was nothing. There was no payback, no sense of reciprocity… We typically ignore them and take no notice — it’s a sad business… What I think and fear is that Britain will draw back from the U.S. without moving closer to Europe. In that sense, London’s bridge is falling down…

Kendall, a British politics specialist – and thus, I’m guessing, an Anglophile – admitted to feeling “a little ashamed” at the way Bush treats Blair.

I’m about as pro-American as anyone you’ll find on the British left, and I agree that the Bush-Blair relationship is a sick joke. But… I think Myers has misunderstood the PM’s motives on this one.

What, I would ask, was the alternative to what we’ve seen over the last six years?

I don’t mean what else could Britain have done. I mean, specifically, what could Blair?

Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 there’s been heated debate in Britain about exactly what Blair should be asking for, in exchange for his support. A deal on climate change? Another push for peace in Gaza? Trade benefits?

But… I don’t think Blair has ever seen the relationship in those terms. It’s much simpler – and much scarier – than that. He believes this stuff. He’s always pursued an activist foreign policy – remember Kosovo? – and he was pushing for something to be done about Saddam when Clinton was in charge. (Clinton, bless his little cotton socks, wasn’t that stupid.) He is, in a way, a neo-con.

So asking what Blair wanted in exchange for invading Iraq is a meaningless question. It’s like asking what Tom Cruise would want in exchange for accepting an Oscar.

Does he get listened to in the administration? Probably not. But then, the Rumsfield-Cheney axis have never shown much interest in listening to anyone from outside their own clique. I bet he still gets heard by policy makers more clearly than, say, Jacques Chirac, though: “Not much” beats “Bugger all.”

As to the other side of “London’s bridge”… With the exception of Ted Heath, Blair has probably been the most pro-European prime minister Britain has ever had. He was in favour of the Euro; he agreed to the EU constitution; he has said in the past that the idea of Britain having a future outside Europe is essentially inconceivable.

That Britain hasn’t moved closer to Europe despite that enthusiasm seems, to me, to be due to both popular antipathy to Brussels, and genuine differences in outlook between Britain and much of the continent. The British largely believe in market economics and nation states; the French largely believe in European integration and the French social model.

Given those inherent differences, I’m really not sure what “moving closer to Europe” is supposed to look like. But the fact that Britain is now part of an identifiable block of liberal EU economies, rather than some kind of isolated freak state, has got to be a good sign, right?

Blair’s foreign policy has been a disaster; he has no real influence in the US; and if there is a core group of European countries, Britain is clearly not part of it. On all those points, Myers was right.

But for Tony Blair – for a man of his convictions – what was the alternative?

NHS costs are growing an an annual rate of about 6%, largely due to several years of generous wage settlements and increasingly pricey drugs.

This hasn’t been that big a problem because, for most of the last decade, NHS funding has been growing at a rate of about 8%. From next year, though, we’re going to see that figure cut to closer to 3%.

So costs are going to increase roughly twice as fast as income will. And deficits, you recall, are already looking likely to hit £1bn for the second year running.

You might want to make sure you get enough vitamins this winter, that’s all I’m saying.

Okay, so the pattern didn’t hold in much of the third world, but that was just a question of bad policy/corrupt government/post-colonial malaise (delete as appropriate).

But what if this can’t go on forever. What if we’re approaching a second, more intractable Malthusian trap. What happens if there just aren’t enough resources on this planet to sustain 6 billion people in Western lifestyles.

I don’t want to worry anyone, but commodity prices have almost doubled in the last twenty years. That to me suggests demand is outpacing supply. And, while it’s quite conceivable that when oil prices get high enough we’ll switch to renewables, it’s much harder to work out what we can do when we start running out of copper or zinc. Maybe there just isn’t enough metal on earth to provide every one of us with a car and an iPod.

So come on then, free marketeers: how are we getting out of this one?

The Democrats will lose the midterms. And that’s probably all they deserve.

Don’t get me wrong – that’s not what I want to happen. What I want is for the Republicans to be thrown out on to the street, and for the Democrats to spend the next two years doing such a good impression of great government that, come 2008, the GOP are still consumed by recriminations and self-loathing and a Clinton-Obama dream ticket sweeps to victory. That’s what I want to happen.

Reality, though, is rarely so accommodating – and anyone who pays even the slightest bit of attention to US politics will be familiar with the list of advantages the Republicans have behind them. The power of incumbency; an electoral map so gerrymandered that only a tenth of House seats are even competitive; fewer vulnerable Senate seats up for reelection than their opponents; and an electoral base composed of evangelists who fear Satan and all his demons only slightly less than they fear the idea of a Congress led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. All this the Republicans have on their side.

And the Democrats have… erm, the fact that noone likes Bush very much. Oh, and that thing about Mark Foley liking boys.

They have no coherent strategy on Iraq, but that’s not a problem, because they have no coherent strategy on anything else either. Free trade, education, healthcare… It’s not that they don’t have any policies. They’ve got dozens of the sodding things. And the only one they all seem to agree on is, “We’re not the other guys.”

And John Kerry? The man so many of us had so much hope riding on in 2004, when we were heartbroken to see him cruelly rejected by the American people? What a tit.

The Republicans have spent the last six years strip mining everything that is great about America, and selling it on to the likes of Halliburton. They don’t just deserve to lose, they deserve to be humiliated.

But the Democrats… They don’t deserve to win. And they probably won’t.

Many thanks for your letter. If you would be so good as to look behind you and use your binoculars to scan the horizon, there is an outside chance that you might locate the point.

The letter I refer to was printed in last week’s Economist, and relates to the Iraq war (yes, I know, I’m sorry, I’m sick of it too, but sometimes the only way to stop the flow of steam from my aural cavities is to scream; and not wanting to lose my job right now, blogging will have to do).

In it, a Mr Terry Nugent of Illinois takes the news magazine to task for its assertion that only “the wilfully dim-sighted” would fail to notice that the Iraq war has gotten terrorists rather excited.

Mr Nugent smugly notes that “I haven’t noticed any Manhattan skyscrapers burning lately” (except of course for that which was unfortunate enough to be the inadvertent target of the Yankees’ kamikaze pitcher Cory Lidle, and I don’t suppose we can blame Bush for that one). Then he moves in for the kill:

…The sad fact is that jihadists will use any reason to spread their murder and mayhem. Had we left Iraq unmolested they would have incinerated the innocent on behalf of Chechnya, Palestine, etc, on whatever rationale they found in the day’s news…

Deep healing breaths, deep healing breaths.

Okay. One more time for the hard of understanding. The leaders of al-qaeda and its pals, the Osamas and Hassan Nasrallahs of this world, believe themselves to be fighting a war against the nebulously allied forces of America, zionism, capitalism and modernity. Our Mr Nugent is not wrong in noticing that these chaps were pissed off a long time before Dubya decided it would be a pretty neat idea to finish what his dad started.

What he has failed to notice, however, is that these leaders are reliant on a generous supply of impressionable young Muslims, who feel their religion/values/way of life (delete as appropriate) are under attack and want to fight back. These guys provide the jihadists with foot soldiers and suicide bombers. Without people willing to fight for them, the leaders of al-qaeda are just another bunch of religious nutjobs shouting from a street corner, no bigger threat to our way of life that that chap who stands at Oxford Circus with a megaphone offering you the choice of being a sinner or a winner.

The jihadists will, indeed, use any reason to spread their murder and mayhem – but without a cause célèbre to act as a recruiting sergeant, they’re going to be a lot less good at it. The invasion of Iraq gave them that cause, in one fell swoop making many thousands of people a lot more open to the notion that the west was at war with Islam. Which, you may recall, we’re not.

Mr Nugent has, in effect, fallen prey to what one might term the “lump of jihad” fallacy.

And, Terry? That smug line about Manhattan continuing unscathed? In July last year my city was attacked by terrorists. And despite John Reid’s contorted attempts to claim otherwise, the bombers were pretty unambiguous in citing the invasion of Iraq as a reason for it.