Kilroy: I blame my secretary, the BBC, sub-editors...

Accusation and counter-accusation were flying thick and fast last night in the controversy over Robert Kilroy-Silk's comments on Arabs. In the past 24 hours, the TV presenter has blamed his secretary, the BBC, the "forces of political correctness" and the Sunday Express.

The newspaper, meanwhile, blamed the BBC, and some sources at the paper blamed Kilroy himself. If the arguments in his television studio had been this good, his programme would have been compulsory viewing.

At the centre of it all was his column last Sunday in which he described Arabs as "suicide bombers, limb-amputators, women repressers". This led to him being reported to the police for incitement to racial hatred and his show being suspended by the BBC.

Complicating matters was the fact that this column was an inadvertent repeat of one published last April. And clouding things even further was the fact that the earlier column referred to "Arab countries", while the 2004 version used the ethnic term "Arabs".

Last night, in early editions of the Sunday Express, Kilroy said his secretary sent the wrong email attachment, and he insisted that his remarks had not caused offence when they were first published in April last year. However, a senior source at the paper claimed that, far from removing the word "countries" in the second article, editors had added it to the first one to "make it less inflammatory".

The truth was unclear, and, just for good measure, Kilroy-Silk took the opportunity in today's paper to invoke the Second World War and the memory of his late father, who died defending the "rights to freedom".