Matthew Norman: Oh Carol – you just don't get it

Her mother saw nothing intrinsically wrong with the apartheid regime of which her father was a trenchant admirer in private, and her twin brother helped to prepare a coup d'etat on another African nation from behind the gates of a Cape Town home serviced by black people housed in tiny corrugated iron shacks in the garden. Given this thermonuclear family's credentials, there may be small irony in Carol, always until now the Good Thatcher, being the one to come a cropper over race.

Exactly what this overgrown Labrador puppy of a woman said in the green room after BBC1's The One Show last Thursday while chatting with its magnificent presenter Adrian Chiles, the glorious Jo Brand and others is disputed, and speculating about the tennis player's identity has a whiff of decomposing red herring. But when Carol, well known for sharing her late sire's fondness for a tincture, opined that Roger Federer would struggle against "that golliwog" in the Australian Open, she wasn't referring to a white guy.

Some cite Andy Murray, purely as a diversionary tactic, but she must have known he'd been knocked out, and his severe new haircut rules him out anyway. Apart from Federer, in fact, the only men left in the draw by then were Rafael Nadal and Fernando Verdasco. Since neither has a corpuscle of black blood or any other feature that might have lent itself to a jam jar, Carol's grasp of Grand Slam contenders is matched only by her mastery of the prevailing mores of racial nomenclature. Unless, of course, "golliwog" is the code word among those of her age and Sloaney background for any man who hits topspin forehands down the line for a living. Which seems a long shot, if not way over the baseline.

Her bemused reaction to the ensuing melodramatics confirms that she no more comprehends the distasteful nature of the word than does her media claque. If these supporters include a few writers, broadcasters and phone-in callers whose barely repressed rage at the latest evidence that PC wears a straitjacket hints at nightly wet dreams of driving through Stockwell screaming the n-word through a megaphone, the vast majority are, like Carol herself, dense rather than malevolent.

Theirs is a failure of the imagination, the inability to imagine that words spoken without conscious ill intent might be heard with anguish and revulsion. To them, the racist spectrum has the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan at one end and those soundly against lynching at the other, with nothing in between. That vast quagmire of nuance in the middle remains invisible to them, which is why every now and then one of them strolls blithely into the quicksand.

In poor Carol's mind it is all no doubt a load of rot. Foolishness on this scale may verge on the endearing (imagine talking like that with no conception that your audience, being white, might be startled). But ignorance is no defence, and those who defend her reveal nothing but their own ignorance.

Yet if Carol and her voluble clique of what's-wrong-with-golli-anyway-cos-I-had-a-doll-as-a-kid-and-loved-it-to-bits merchants just don't get it, neither does the BBC. It too has not the faintest grasp of nuance, and the dearth is proving catastrophic. No one present in the green room asked for her dismissal, or wanted it. They merely did the sensible thing, informing management that a damaging story might break, as tends to happen when a sleb gives voice to rampant idiocy in a crowded room, and the wise response would have been a stern word from a senior executive.

He or she needed only explain what should need no explanation: that even if the French player Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, whom I assume she had in mind, does bear a passing resemblance to the character on the old Robertson's jar, this is the sort of phrase not be uttered again on BBC soil; and that if she was naively unaware of the implications, she might think of educating herself as to why golli, wog and the two elided are offensive both to black people and to the civilised of any colour.

To sack so good-natured a character for an imbecile remark in a private conversation, and cause her far more distress than she herself could have caused, is in its comparatively trifling way as absurd a misjudgement as the refusal to screen the Gaza appeal. These errors are symptoms of the illness paralysing this last great national institution like some kind of motor neurone disease of the soul. It is the pathological terror of causing offence, and it seems to me far more lethal and pernicious than the casual insensitivity to causing offence of Carol and her ilk.

In her case it was the fury of the liberal left the Beeb acted to avoid, and with Gaza the outrage of the illiberal right, so in this regard we can discern some kind of balance. But then it's hard to think of any group of which the BBC isn't scared to death these days, other of course than that shrinking, squealing band of us who watch its disintegration with breaking hearts. For there's a dreadful, ominous sense, mounting and solidifying up all the time, that the BBC as we knew and adored is dying; that the rank cowardice inherent in these pitiful errors has become so corrosive and endemic among its management that the decline is irreversible.

If we are witnessing an assisted suicide in slow motion, there's no knowing precisely when the Swiss clinic will finish the job, but no doubting when the work began. This systemic loss of nerve stems directly from the specific loss of nerve whose fifth anniversary just passed, when Greg Dyke and Gavyn Davies were meekly bounced into resigning in the immediate aftermath of Lord Hutton publishing his unspeakable report.

That initial surrender to bullying opened the floodgates for so many more that the official BBC flag would now be a white flag on a white background were it not for an internal commission warning Mark Thompson that the design might be interpreted as offensively racist.

If Carol Thatcher is too lazy to outgrow the casual assumptions of her generation and background, those who sacked her are craven apparatchiks who yield to panic before even attempting to distinguish between the daft and the malicious. This isn't exactly a banquet of choice, but of the two I know which I'd rather carried on working in a building to which staff inexplicably still refer, despite the pre-apartheid South African roots, as White City.

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