Micturating prostitutes? "The Kremlin Candidate?" The BBC really needs to control its pathological hatred of Trump.

I generally try to avoid the BBC Ten O'Clock News, so on Wednesday evening I turned over to ITV's News at Ten...

...purely in order to enjoy the sight of the odious Mark Carney trying to explain why all of his dire predictions regarding Britain's economy in the event of a pro-Brexit referendum vote have failed to materialise. Earlier in the day, he had even gone so far as to admit that it's actually the rest of the EU that's facing a sharp post-Brexit downturn - the UK will, apparently, be relatively okay. I was really looking forward to hearing someone - preferably a reporter - put to him the following point: if he knew that what he was saying before the referendum was untrue, then he had either deliberately lied to the country in order to help Project Fear win - in which case, he should resign immediately - or, if he honestly believed what he was predicting would come to pass, then he evidently knows sod-all about economics and really shouldn't be the Governor of the Bank of England. Either he was shilling for Dave and George, or he was an economic ignoramus - whichever was the case, this wretched man should have been back in Canada by Thursday morning.

But ITV's main newsreader, the disconcertingly shiny-faced Tom Bradby, immediately launched into one of his irritatingly chatty, content-lite introductions, and it seemed their lead story was going to be a load of nonsense about The Donald paying prostitutes to wee on his Moscow hotel bed. 

Exasperated, and safe in the knowledge that the BBC wouldn't allow its institutional hatred of Trump to compromise its journalistic standards by lending any credence to what appeared to be a set of unsubstantiated rumours published by some silly left-wing entertainment website (which I used to visit occasionally until it turned into an anti-conservative, cultural Marxist propaganda machine, obsessed with the LGBT community,  transgender khazis , Black Lives Matter thugs, the cuddly wonderfulness of Muslims, and other such snowflake generation enthusiasms). I could just imagine the BBC News editorial meeting where eager young SJW editorial pups had lobbied hard for running the Trump smear story at the top of the order - but older, wiser heads had pushed it down into the second half of the running norder, where it would be treated with a mixture of disbelief and amusement. "We don't want people to think the BBC's editorial standards have sunk so low that we'd willingly inflate an unconfirmed story into a lead item just because we don't approve of the subject of the smear campaign. We're the BBC, and everyone knows we are utterly politically unbiased. Besides, which one of us can honestly say we haven't paid a prostitute to wazz on us in a hotel room? Or... well, let's move on, shall we? I suggest the lead headline should be something along the lines of "Carney Admits He's a Useless C..."

You get the drift. BBC News used to pride itself on not pandering to the public's penchant for sleazy, unconfirmed gossip (especially if it involved a BBC star called Jimmy). Newsnight  bucked that trend over the utterly false Lord McAlpine rumours, and that didn't go hugely well, did it? And the corporation's attempt to go all tabloidy by hiring  a helicopter to take pictures of Cliff Richard's home as police searched it because of (again) unsubstantiated allegations of a sexual nature had made it look both slovenly and vindictive. So they obviously wouldn't make the same mistake with Trump. Would they?

And how! On and on it went. They were so gushingly, pant-wettingly excited (sorry - I must get off this urinary theme), I thought someone was going to have a nasty accident right there in the studio, live on national television. I switched off when I began to realise that, as far as the chronically Europhiliac BBC is concerned, the Governor of the Bank of England admitting he's either a liar or an incompetent and confirming that Britain's economic prospects appear to be considerably healthier than the rest of the EU's thanks to Brexit was of no interest whatsoever. I'll admit I was genuinely saddened that my former employers had sunk to these sorry journalistic depths. 

I see that Panorama is jumping on the anti-Trumpmobile. I've just checked online, and, while I do't have a complete list of every Panorama subject over the past 20 years, I can find no sign that it has ever covered any of the rumours which have swirled for years around Hillary Clinton, e.g. Benghazi, her email server, questionable donations to the Clinton Foundation, the bizarrely long list of people close to the Clintons who have died in mysterious circumstances - and at least a dozen other stories. True, the Trump story has the added "sizzle" of the involvement of the British security services - the only thing which justifies running it at all. But the lead story for minutes on end? 

Let's imagine an alternate reality in which the Governor of the Bank of England had interfered in the Brexit campaign by warning voters that staying in the EU would inevitably affect the economy adversely, and had repeated those warnings after the country had voted to stay in the EU. If that same Governor, six months after issuing those gloomy predictions, had suddenly turned round and admitted that none of his gloom had been justified, would the BBC's main bulletin have ignored that story. Did I just see a bear disappear into woods clutching a roll of Andrex? (Enough with the references to bodily function already! Ed)

I'm not a Trump fan, and I have no idea whether or not these latest stories are true. Sounds like a Russian sting operation of some kind - but who knows? Certainly not the BBC or ITV News. Maybe they'd like to get back to us when they have some actual evidence. Meanwhile, I'll stick with Fox.