There are few better ways of beating the Monday morning blues, I find, than tuning in to Start the Week (Radio 4, Monday). Within minutes, I will have forgotten that I've five days of work ahead of me. For I will have been reduced to such a state of rabid, teeth-grinding fury that the only thing on my mind is: "Must get to Broadcasting House and Kill! Kill! Kill!"

Last week's episode, I'm happy to report, was no exception. I was especially delighted when the fluently PC curator of some hopelessly contrived new exhibition at Tate Modern came up with such choice phrases as: "The city offers almost utopian possibilities about reinventing the self." She went on to praise her own exhibition's "incredible celebration of a sort of kinetic geography".

What does all this jargon mean? Would any of us care if we found out? And, most pertinently, why the hell doesn't Jeremy Paxman - Paxo the fearless, Paxo the ruthless, Paxo the skewerer of mealy-mouthed politicians - steam in there with a: "For God's sake, talk English, will you, woman? You're addressing an audience of real people, not some tiny, earnest and navel-gazingly abstruse sub­committee of polytechnic lecturers."?

As it happens, I think I may know the answer to the last one. It's my belief that the judicious and impartial Paxman I once idolised has been kidnapped by aliens and replaced by a lily-livered, glibly PC doppelganger. I'm not sure when this happened exactly. It might have been as long as two years ago, which is the only time I ever met him. Paxman, I noticed, was much warmer than he looks on TV or sounds on radio. Much more of a luvvie, too. I actually witnessed him greet several fellow media types by kissing them on both cheeks.

No doubt there will be those who argue - poor purblind fools - that Paxman today is much the same as he ever was. After all, he still displays the same adorably blustering arrogance, the same cocksure belief in the unassailable rightness of his moral stance on every issue and he still barks his furious interruptions at anyone whose argument he deems flabby or intellectually flawed.

What's significant, though, is how often Paxman doesn't interrupt: the "absence" of Paxman, as one of his pseudier contributors might put it. All too often his guests are allowed to get away with statements which, while no doubt self-evidently true and meaningful in Guardian-reading circles, might strike any detached listener as vapid, wrongheaded or positively loopy.

The other week, for example, one contributor was allowed to imply - unchallenged -that Nigeria's kleptocrat dictators were really no worse morally than Rockefeller and America's "robber barons". The Republican sympathiser Ronan Bennett, meanwhile, was permitted to dismiss Ulster's unionists as insular (without being invited to suggest where, exactly, that put extreme Irish nationalists).   Another bore on about "gender constructs", as if such drivel had any relevance to anyone outside academia.

Yes, I suppose it's true that in Melvyn Bragg's day, too, Start the Week had the same creepily consensual atmosphere of more-liberal-than-thou smugness.  But at least old Melv never made any bones about being an old lefty.  And at last he had just that hint of the traditional working-class reactionary to make him unpredictable.  The new Paxman has none of these saving graces.  He's fast becoming the liberal elite's useful idiot.

James Delingpole  (Radio review, mid 2001)