If the BBC really cared about restoring impartiality they'd start by fixing Newsnight

Newsnight has not covered itself with glory recently. First, poor old Laura Kuenssberg accidentally sent Boris Johnson her briefing notes before a scheduled interview, an error that anybody who uses email will understand. It happens and most of us probably just grinned sympathetically: it was no big deal.

No, what appalled me, though sadly it was no great surprise, was that Newsnight then cancelled the interview altogether.

The idea that an interviewee might actually know what the questions are is anathema to modern interviewers who, lacking the gravity and curiosity of a Dimbleby or a Humphrys, are less interested in exploring a situation or a policy than in producing a "gotcha" moment.

They want the car crash, the headlines, the badly expressed answer that can be widely disseminated in a misinterpreted form and indeed sometimes such misinterpretations are deliberate in the hunt for melodrama. If Tim Davie were really interested in restoring some impartiality to the BBC, he could make a greater effort to define the purpose of an interview.

Then there was Newsnight's grovelling interview with the ever-whingeing Amanda Abbington in which the agenda was expressly not to challenge anything she said.

When she claimed that "nearly half her complaints were upheld" the normally sharp Victoria Derbyshire refrained from pointing out that meant that more than half were not. Indeed six out of 17 means that 11 were not which is nearly twice the number that were... but Derbyshire just let it go.

In the period before I finally switched off in disgust, the questions mostly began with "how did you feel?". I suppose it is just possible that after I went to bed Abbington was asked to explain why, at the age of 50-odd, she did not simply tell Giovanni Pernice to stop what was offending her or explain why the statement "you have talent but you are not using it" justifies a complaint of bullying, but I doubt it.

Abbington was little known before this unseemly business but now generates headlines based on grievance after grievance.

It reminds me of Meghan Markle and it is equally unattractive.

The lunatics really have taken over the asylum, or in this case the Prison Service. A woman with school-age children lost her job when she was recalled to prison for 12 weeks because 20 YEARS AGO she missed an appointment with her probation officer. It beggars belief at a time when prisons are badly overcrowded, convicts are being released early and the courts are hesitant about sending serial offenders to jail.

If they had recalled this unfortunate woman at the time it would have been right and well-deserved but after 20 years of a law-abiding life it is so stupid that I almost did not write about it because I had severe difficulty in believing it to be true.

Sadly it is. Once again the rulebook triumphs over proportionality and common sense. And in this case over basic humanity as well.

Our quietly spoken, benignly-bespectacled Prime Minister is in reality a bit of a dictator.

He does not allow conscientious dissent as was made clear by his removing the whip from seven of his MPs who voted against him on the two-child benefit policy

Sir Keir Starmer, above, tried very hard to force through the snatching of the old folks' fuel allowance without a

vote and now, with breathtaking arrogance, he cedes the Chagos Islands to an ally of China without putting the matter before MPs, let alone holding a referendum of the Chagossians.

He is acting like a despot so the question is how long his MPs will put up with it.

They might turn quicker than you think, Keir.

My very first novel, The Clematis Tree, which came out in 2000 and was a Times Bestseller, dealt with a family with a disabled child and an ailing grandfather against the background of a Euthanasia Bill going through Parliament.

In my book it was called The Terminally Ill Persons Act but its provisions were almost identical with those of Kim Leadbeater's real-life Assisted Suicide Bill.

It is still in print and over the weekend I dug out a copy and re-read some of it. The arguments for and against haven't changed and some of my characters were badly torn, as will many MPs be during the current debate but one thing I did not foresee either in fiction or in reality was the advent of the "slippery slope" even before the Bill is published.

A group of Labour MPs is already proposing that the terms should not be confined to the terminally ill but should encompass anyone "suffering unendurably." That is exactly the sort of situation one might have expected to arise when the Bill had become an Act and its boundaries were being pushed as has happened elsewhere, but for it to start now is an ominous indicator of the society we will become if the Leadbeater attempt succeeds.

I was saddened to learn of the recent death of Michael Ancram, one of the last truly serious Conservative politicians. He was chairman of the party during the Hague years when we were both in the Shadow Cabinet.

He played a huge but largely unsung role in negotiating the Northern Irish treaty under John Major for which Tony Blair later claimed all the credit.

I first met Michael, below, in 1974 when I was sent by the Bow Group to be his PA for the October election. It was an exciting campaign and my job was to go before him and hold the fort, speaking at meetings until he arrived.

We were doing three a night in villages in a rural area on the Scottish borders but after the last meeting we went off to his country house, where he played guitar to his father's piano accompaniment and youngest sister's singing.

He was never a plotter or a back-stabber and had the unusual distinction of being widely trusted by all factions. I do not see his like in this Parliament and I think it will be a long time before I do again.