AT last the BBC has decided what to do with the former Today Programme presenter James “Jim” Naughtie.

Jim, you may recall, has made a career out of uttering obscenities on air – when he erroneously thinks the microphone is switched off. One morning he exclaimed “s**t” just before the Greenwich time signal. And he notoriously called health secretary Jeremy Hunt “Jeremy C***”. Mr Hunt graciously commented: “And I always thought he quite liked me!”

Jim has been despatched to the US from where he is sending back tedious reports on the Presidential election campaign. But if he wants to continue his brilliant career of verbal naughti(e)ness, he will have to practise the American idiom according to which one’s ass is not something one rides upon. And their expression “keep your pecker up” has an entirely different conotation in the US from what it has here.

But why should the British Broadcasting Corporation go to the expense of covering a foreign election campaign – when this only inflicts boredom on us? I asked them and they told me: “The US is our closest ally and the President is the most powerful statesman in the world.”

I agree. But the American electoral system is tedious and lunatic. They are obsessed with electioneering over there and the campaign for the Presidency lasts a whole year, with the result not announced until November.

It would be quite reasonable and in order for the BBC to send Jim over there on say, Halloween, with the task of reporting for a couple of weeks until the issue is finally decided.

But this year-long trailing around the primary skirmishes in Ohio, New Hampshire and to something called “Super Tuesday” is preposterous. Who could possibly be interested? Even the Americans themselves are not very interested and turnout at the polls is usually low.

We British people have a healthy contempt for our own politicians – given the expenses scandal – still going on, by the way – and all their vacuous sound-bites, spin and sleaze. But our MPs are princes compared with the candidates in the US Presidential race. That word “race” says it all. In Britain a certain dignity still attaches to the political process: our candidates “stand” for election, while in the States vulgarly they “run.”

You never hear an American Presidential hopeful say anything remotely interesting – or even anything meaningful. There is little mention of policies and instead the air is filled with empty slogans. For example, they all say, “I’m gonna make America great again!” And then they whoop and they weep and display every symptom of emotional incontinence, while the BBC gives the whole tawdry spectacle wall-to-wall coverage, as if it were a thing of significance. When I think of political oratory, the names that come to mind are Seneca, Cicero, Pitt, Churchill, Bevan, Powell and, most recently, Hilary Benn. But where today is the American successor to Jefferson?

US politicians are admen and they speak the language of Madison Avenue – admen with adspeak. Their TV “debates” and their conventions remind us only of those revoltingly mawkish showbiz awards junkets. And of course the BBC is as much in thrall to those circuses as to the politicos. Both the Presidential campaign and the Oscars are void of content, ineffably dull. There is not an ounce of sincerity in the US election campaign. So it reminds me of George Burns’ remark: “The main thing is sincerity. And if you can fake that, you’ve got it made!”

Bring Jim home then and let him do his on-air swearing this side of the Atlantic.