After the fourth invitation from Piers Morgan’s team to appear on his Uncensored show, I finally decided it might be time to accept. This programme, I was told, would be on American foreign policy and the war with Iran, following Morgan’s interview with John Bolton. That sounded, at least on paper, like the invitation least likely to lead to the circus of shouting and hatred the programme is known for. Three experts in a studio, responding to a former US national security adviser, sounded civilised. Almost old-fashioned.

Piers and I have a short but revealing history. I once criticised his show in these pages for its decline into algorithmic bear-baiting. He responded with an article entitled, ‘In defence of Piers Morgan, by Piers Morgan’, which described me as ‘slavishly pro-Israel’.

So it was hardly a surprise when midway through the show, he asked if I am ‘very pro-Israel’ and ‘partisan’. His evidence appeared to be a hasty inspection of my headlines in this magazine over the past couple of years, apparently without the inconvenience of reading the articles beneath them. This was a forensic analysis in the same sense that licking a thermometer is medical research.

Does explaining all this make me ‘partisan’ or ‘slavish’ to Israel? I don’t think so

Does explaining all this make me ‘partisan’ or ‘slavish’ to Israel? I don’t think so

My answer was that I am not ‘slavishly’ anything: I defend Israel when I believe the facts and the regional context justify it, and I criticise Israeli policy when I believe criticism is warranted. Sure enough, I often find the facts lead to a less instinctively critical position of Israel than those who want to trace just about every geopolitical disaster back to the Jewish state.

Sitting next to me in the studio was a man called Scott Horton, who has blamed Israel for a range of ills, from provoking 9/11 (‘Naftali Bennett is the cause of September 11th’) to threatening to nuke London, Paris, and Rome. Yet on the show there was no equivalent health warning that he was a ‘partisan commentator’, no caveat that he is a heavily biased anti-interventionist, no attempt to classify him as anti-Israel or reflexively hostile to American power, before he was asked to speak. In fact, former MP and British soldier Col Bob Stewart and I were introduced as ‘a special studio panel assembled in honour of the visiting Scott Horton.’

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