Rogue Mail

In leaping to the defence of children’s TV presenter, Cerrie Bernell, Peter White says the press should have gone the whole nine yards

It’s never easy to suss out the stance of the Daily Mail on disability. The paper which delights in sniffing out cases of pub football-playing claimants of Incapacity Benefit, and any possible examples of “political correctness gone mad”, nonetheless occasionally also leaps to the defence of what it sees as a “wronged” disabled individual; and happily, that’s what it’s chosen to do in the case of Cerrie Bernell. Cerrie, you’ll remember, was set upon by a gang of blogging, pig-ignorant yobbos – it’s nice to be able to use even more outspoken language than the Mail.

Cerrie is a new presenter on CBeebies who happens to have one arm which ends at her elbow, a circumstance which the yobbos claimed would frighten their children. The fact that the children of such yobbos must, merely by being the yobbos’ children, have seen far more frightening things already in their short lives would not occur to them. Mail writer Alison Pearson gave them a measured flea in their ear, and the Mail then gave Alison Lapper of Trafalgar Square plinth fame space to deliver one with a more acerbic bite. The paper is even more to be credited since it appears to have voluntarily given up the usually irresistible pleasure of accusing the BBC of “political correctness gone mad”, a temptation not resisted by the yobbos.

My one regret about the whole incident is that the Mail could have had its cake, and eaten it. It could have stood up for Cerrie, and still taken a pop at the BBC for its distinctly unambitious target of appointing only four per cent of disabled staff, when the prevalence of disability in the community, even at the most conservative estimate, is well over ten per cent. Their position was spelt out for me by former BBC director-general, Gregg Dyke, who said to a colleague that “disability was difficult”. I can’t tell you what he meant by that, since I could never get an appointment with him to discuss it. Instead, I went to the real judges: my grandchildren Hannah aged six, and Paul aged four. I asked them what they thought of Cerrie Bernell. “She’s good,” they said. I pressed on, “But what about her arm?”, I asked. “What about it?”, they said.