Groupthink rules OK

On Radio 4’s WO this morning, Jane Garvey addressed London’s (Conservative) Deputy Mayor as 'Mr Malthouse' and interrupted him to transfer the talking stick to her other guest, a woman from Lambeth Prostitution Strategy who was addressed as ‘Diane’, in right-on sisterly fashion.

With first names pretty much de rigeur in BBC radio interview protocol, even for non-comrades and whether the interlocutor be an emeritus professor of Greek or a convicted paedophile, how come Mister Malthouse was singled out for such old fashioned courtesy?

What on earth has he done to prompt Miz Garvey to put such distance between herself and the Conservative Deputy Mayor of London?

One might almost think she found it impossible to regard him as a fellow human being trying to do something for the victims of London's pimps and people traffickers; that she regarded him instead as some sort of alien of whose motives it was only circumspect to be suspicious. Oh, wait...

Miz Garvey mused that the Deputy Mayor's project to deny pimps access to mobile phone service for advertising purposes, on which he has been working for ten years, might be no more than a political gimmick. Now imagine her saying that if he were the Labour Deputy Mayor, doing the same work. Quite.