Today I made my debut on the Agenda programme recorded for Press TV, an international media outlet paid for by Iran Broadcasting. The subject was British Foreign Policy after the UK elections.

The programme should go out this weekend, or maybe the weekend after.

Islamic journalist Yvonne Ridley was the host. [Update: now see Yvonne’s comment  below correcting this description of her.]

With me on the panel were Lembit Opik, a vivid Lib Dem MP whose defeat to resurgent local Conservatives was one of the shock results of last week’s election (especially for him), and Jonathan Isaby of Conservative Home.

Being unfamiliar with the subtleties of Press TV (and in fact any TV) I rather expected a sardonic if not aggressive grilling from Yvonne. I had some good lines ready to shoot back at Iran and its foreign policy.

Instead she asked friendly and reasonable/mainstream (albeit if at times strange) questions about UK foreign policy issues, and then let us get on with giving our various answers freely.

One of the breaks in the discussion featured a curious film clip which seemed to suggest that in the past 200+ years nearly 100 wars had ‘resulted’ from British foreign policy, ie as if we alone had started or caused them. 

As an example of this British bellicosity the height of Nelson’s Column in London was mentioned(!), plus the fact that the column had been erected to celebrate England’s ‘infamous’ (sic) victory at the Battle of Trafalgar. No mention of our handy role in thwarting expansionist French imperialism then, or Hitler’s aggression later.

Much then was made in a trite way of Tony Blair’s five separate military adventures. Would the new ruling coalition pursue such ‘unpeaceful’ policies? What about obvious sharp divisions within the new coalition on Europe and defence?

I took up the zany reference to the Battle of Trafalgar, saying that far from being ‘infamous’ it had in fact been famous and generally excellent. It made no sense to look at ‘Blair’s Wars’ without remembering the new-found cooperative context of the end of the Cold War. The New Labour intervention in Serbia/Kosovo had been led in part to counter international criticism that the West had neglected to act properly to defend the Bosnian Muslims. Plus the whole situation had been transformed for the worse by 9/11, when Al Qaeda declared war on the West.

I said that a major blunder by the Labour Government had been to separate out the FCO from DFID and ‘development’, making the funding and coordination of UK foreign policy as a whole far less effective. Alas all parties seemed to favour keeping that useless arrangement. Lembit warmly agreed.

I also put in a good word for new UK Defence Secretary Liam Fox as someone who I knew had given a lot of serious thought to ‘defence’ in a wider sense (cyber attacks, energy supplies and so on). And I plugged my defence of drone warfare to hit legitimate terrorist targets in countries unable or unwilling to deal with them.     

If anyone can bear to watch, it will be up there on the Internet in due course.