Remember Norman Tebbit attacking Kate Adie in 1985 because her coverage of the bombing of Libya was insufficiently bloodthirsty? Or Mr

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Remember Norman Tebbit attacking Kate Adie in 1985 because her coverage of the bombing of Libya was insufficiently bloodthirsty? Or Mr Campbell saying he would not let those poor ministers on to Newsnight in case someone sneered at them?This is a zero-sum game, since the obvious tactic of the party in whose favour bias is supposed to be operating is to complain that it too is unfairly treated and thus neutralise the charge. William Hague has just set up a media monitoring unit to reveal the shocking callousness of BBC broadcasters towards his party. The late East German writer Stefan Hermlin tackled this head- on by beginning a lecture: "Speaking as the son of the Jewish capitalist bourgeoisie..."The forms of bias mutate with intellectual and political fashions. In the Soviet bloc this tactic was used by governments to make alternative opinions appear worthless. In the mid-1980s on the left, "fascist" was co-ordinated with "bastards", which had a reassuringly plosive para-rhyme to it.The lumping of people and views into groupings is a dead giveaway of deep-seated prejudice, whether it is Alastair Campbell blasting about the Foreign Office's "Old Etonians" or the withering Tory snobs decrying the views expressed at "Islington dinner parties". The term bien-pensant invariably arrives with "liberal" in tow and "trendy" as an optional extra.

Without reading on, we know that of a bien-pensant, liberal, self-confessed, trendy lifestyle choice merchant, no good can ever come.Through the ideological looking-glass, the right-wing enemies of sturdy left-wingers are invariably described as "lunatic", "deranged" or "further right than Attila the Hun", which must have been funny the first time someone said it, but not the other forty thousand times afterwards When all other words fail, they are "fascist". In the testier Conservative columns, those of us who do not believe that most of society's woes are down to the baleful influence of the 1960s become "lifestyle choice merchants". Similarly, the words "self-styled" or "self-confessed" are like the man with a red flag walking in front of a train: they warn you that the next loaded statement will be along shortly. The perception of undeclared influence undermines trust in judicial process.

So Lord Hoffman made a quite serious error, on any reading of the case, in not declaring his links to the charity. The most acceptable form of the bias-ridden argument is the one which is so open that it collapses into ritual Imparting no new information strengthens existing prejudice. He did not consider his wife's Amnesty International role - and his own charitable support - as affecting his ruling. But one can hardly blame the ex-dictator's lawyers for seeing the matter differently. Take Lord Hoffman, the Law Lord who delivered the final vote in favour of allowing the Pinochet extradition procedure to continue.