SHOULD we give a fig what Anjem Choudary thinks about anything? This man leads a group which calls itself Islam4UK and has said he will try to persuade people in Wootton Bassett to back an anti-war parade along the main street.

This is the same route through the Wiltshire town that is used to bring home the bodies of troops from Afghanistan, in an unofficial ceremony that appears to have struck a chord with the British people.

Choudary’s announcement that he wishes to hold such a protest has provoked the sort of fury it was all too easy to predict.

Commentators of all shades have turned on him, while Prime Minister Gordon Brown has obliged by condemning the plans as “abhorrent and offensive”.

Well, you wouldn’t expect Mr Brown to say anything else, and his chosen adjectives probably have it covered. Yet the important point here doesn’t have anything to do with the appropriateness or otherwise of a ceremony in which 500 coffins would be carried through the town as a symbol of the Muslim victims of the war in Afghanistan.

What should give pause for thought is the willingness of the British media to lap up everything this bogeyman of the moment has to say.

For Choudary appears to be a self-publicist, with narrow support, but a clever eye for manipulation. The British media love nothing better than a willing villain who can represent everything the fine upstanding populace is supposed to abhor. Choudary is more than willing to step up to that role, even telling one newspaper that he was happy to be considered the most hated man in Britain.

This man appears to be a bigot who wishes to provoke division, and thanks to the way his views are amplified by the over-eager media – including, in a tiny way, a column such as this – what amounts more or less to a one-man protest is suddenly accorded too much importance.

The rightness or otherwise of the war in Afghanistan, and whether or not our troops should still be engaged in that country, are topics which we should be able to debate openly and with proper vigour.

Instead, the debate is hijacked by someone bellowing from the margins. Once such a figure would have struggled to hear himself rant above the hubbub of indifference; now he is given a megaphone by a passing reporter and allowed to shout all over the place, and his eccentric opinions are greeted with the anger he desired.

And what were the chances that Choudary’s anti-war march through Wootton Bassett would ever have taken place? Probably about nil, but you would never have guessed that from all the fuss.

• YOU might have noticed that a General Election is skulking somewhere on the horizon. The politicians are getting themselves all excited (well, the Tory ones), staring gloomily at their scuffed shoes (Labour) or bouncing about with me-too puppyish eagerness (that’ll be those Liberal Democrats).

According to my Sunday newspaper of choice, the parties are now racing “to harness new media as poll battle begins”. One unnamed Tory strategist grew very excitable about the new way of communing with the voters via tweets, Facebook and instant news releases on the internet, averring: “You are talking about a massive upgrading of creative output.”

You may be talking about that, or indeed twittering about it, but many voters are horrified by the prospect of what promises to be a long and stultifying campaign – especially those whose feelings are mostly defined by lingering resentment over MPs’ expenses, a scandal which did more than anything in memory to put people off politics (even if we should be over it by now).

There has also been much excitement, if that’s the word, among the political classes about pre-election debates featuring the three party leaders – with separate debates on BBC1, ITV1 and Sky. Great heavens, that sounds like the best definition of boring it is possible to imagine. Am I alone in wondering what else will be on the box on those nights?