Shadow Education Secretary Michael Gove did us all a great service last week by drawing attention to the BBC's introductory laudations to 'our greatest living historian' Eric Hobsbawm as he claimed that all his prognostications had come true. He's the ghastly academic Stalinist who has inched his way up the Ruritanian ladder to a Companionship of Honour by giving the general impression (though not physically in 1936 in Spain) of right-on sentiments as well as books that seem remarkably dexterous on Chile, China or Venezuela for any one who knows nothing about them. Being the father of Sarah Brown's former business partner probably helped with that one. Last year I had the misfortune of being seated at a table opposite the professor at a dinner in honour of my friend Niall Ferguson. Hobby and I contrived not to exchange so much as a glance or a word as I eagerly scanned his face for evidence of the Reaper and recalled another dinner where some brave soul shouted out 'free Pinochet, jail Hobsbawm'. Had I been told of this seating plan, I'd have avoided the entire evening. The BBC's enthusiasm for Hobby is all the more bizarre since it was on a BBC programme, years ago, that he assented to interviewer Michael Ignatieff's proposition that had the 'noble dream' (lie) worked out in the Soviet Union, the deaths of twenty million people would have been justified in the end. Let's hope Michael Gove is equally attentive to the Marxisant clients and clones Hobby has helped place up and down British academia, who then go on to corrupt the sort of people recruited by the BBC.