The corporate disease is a capacity to believe things that are demonstrably untrue because they are the “corporate line”. The line on female radio-presenters is that they are not as good at political interviews as the men.My own view, widely shared by Today’s audience in the country as opposed to the Westminster Village with which it was, until recently, too intimately associated, is that Sue MacGregor is a genuine match for Humphrys. She has been relentlessly undervalued by a corporation that mistakes her preference for explanation over aggression, for a lack of sophistication.MacGregor told me that she will write about the frustration and anger caused by editors who never criticised her style or challenged her grasp of issues but relentlessly insisted that the boys should get the high-profile interviews She will tell it straight. She has the integrity of a news reporter and little of the ego of a presenter.

Sue MacGregor demonstrated that when I interviewed her for my book. Alone among the presenters with whom I had worked for five years, she told the truth we all knew about Brian Redhead Yes, he was brilliant Yes, he was beguiling. But he was also a bad-tempered little sprite who “embroidered the truth enormously”.As she put it: “He’d invented almost everything, and he’d been clever from the age of eight.” It wasn’t bitchy. It was evidence of MacGregor’s philosophy that Today presenters are there to expose truth not to play concealed parts in the internecine world of politics, whether at Westminster or Television Centre.When MacGregor retires, the best compliment the corporation could pay her would be to reassess their attitude towards female presenters on Britain’s most prestigious show. She came a long way from her early days as a “girl reporter” on World at One. But while she has always attracted loads of respect and admiration from listeners, her managers have routinely fallen into the trap of regarding her contemptuously, as Redhead did, as “the Dowager Duchess of Dingly Dell”.Sue MacGregor has never been a token. The BBC is discovering that as it recognises how hard it is to find someone who can reliably fill her shoes.

Still more astonishing is that MacGregor has earned her reputation as one of the greats of post-war radio while repeatedly being denied the chance to conduct the big, career-defining interviews It’s a mark of her skill that she made it anyway. The pity is that while the young James Naughtie got bogged down in his legendary “kebabbing” row with Neil Kinnock, and Brian Redhead sought a minute’s silence after Nigel Lawson suggested he knew how the man voted, Sue MacGregor would probably have obliged both politicians to simply answer the question. That may not sound spectacular, but it is supposed to be the point.Tim Luckhurst’s book, ‘This is Today’, is published by Aurum Press, price £16.99. Not a single shot has been fired so far, but there’s no doubt we’re at war. First it was the columnists, exchanging noisy salvos over the efficacy of a “war on terrorism”.

The Charge of the Right Brigade, led by Generals Gove, Harris, Daley, Littlejohn and Pollard – in The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Sun and Daily Mail respectively – offered the delicious irony of democracy’s self-appointed defenders trying to bully anyone who disagreed with them into cowed silence. For these armchair generals, it must have come as a shock to discover from an Observer poll that only a little more than half the male population shares their enthusiasm for committing British troops to a “war on terrorism”.But that wasn’t the only significant result in the poll. It also revealed a quieter but no less striking gender divide, with only 36 per cent of women supporting the idea of sending troops to Afghanistan. At first sight, this appears to confirm the theory that women are less warlike than men, an idea that was certainly common currency during the Greenham Common protests in the early 1980s. I’m far from convinced by this notion, but it is worth noting that both figures confirm anecdotal evidence that Tony Blair’s public pronouncements about supporting the President are not universally popular, especially among women voters.
The Wapping and Canary Wharf Home Guard do, however, have the largely uncritical support of the popular press, where a predictable bout of technophilia is already bursting out. The run-up to war is a difficult time for journalists, who aren’t included in Pentagon or MoD planning sessions and have to make to do with reporting not-particularly-riveting troop movements.

On TV, reporters don flak jackets and fondle missiles; newspapers dig out library pictures of previous conflicts and bombard us with statistics about how many planes and ships are being despatched to the conflict zone.It is at this point, I think, that a genuine but more subtle gender difference becomes apparent. The attitudes to war of men and women, once hostilities break out and the gruesome reality becomes apparent, do not seem to me to diverge drastically. They may have done in the past, when many combatants consciously chose to protect their wives, children and parents from the grim truth about life in the trenches. But mass communications, and the awesome increase in civilian casualties as the 20th century wore on, have changed all that.The real difference in how men and women think about war – and there are already dramatic examples of this in the past week’s newspapers – lies in the realm of fantasy. While the body bags and the broken bodies of children still wait in the future, editors and their more bellicose columnists indulge themselves in what are, effectively, war games; “our” forces and weapons are bigger and better than anyone else’s, while people who have never been anywhere near Afghanistan confidently explain how Our Boys will defeat the cowardly enemy on his own terrain.Thus yesterday’s Sun crowed about “Bush’s awesome firepower”. It also wheeled out the paper’s political editor, Trevor Kavanagh, to compare the “chattering classes” who oppose the approaching conflict with “the people who spoke up for Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin”.