I have to admit that I sat down to watch Question Time last night with trepidation.

Having supported the BBC's decision to include BNP leader Nick Griffin on the panel, I was worried that I'd got it wrong.

What if Griffin came across as plausible and clever and the BNP gained further ground as a result?

But at the end of the programme, I went to bed elated and more convinced than ever that the BBC had made the right decision.

I'd expected Griffin to be a better performer: bright, articulate, quick on his feet.

But he wasn't. He was pathetic: contradictory, stumbling, weak and stupid.

The things he'd said in the past - such as the denial of the Holocaust - were put down to being misquoted by journalists. (Oh yes, that old chestnut.) "I can't explain why I used to say those things," he ended up mumbling.

He admitted to meeting the leader of the Ku Klux Klan but insisted he was non-violent.

And the leader of a party which accepts only white people as members was reduced to coming out with the classic: "Skin colour is irrelevant."

Black poet Bonnie Greer dealt with him brilliantly to the point that he didn't get the fact that she was ridiculing him.

Jack Straw was disappointing, failing to grasp the nettle on the key point that the BNP has benefited from the failure of the Government to be clear enough on immigration controls.

It simply isn't good enough that we do not know how many people are entering and leaving the country. We must not pull up the drawbridge but there must be better control.

The debate goes on about whether Nick Griffin should have been on Question Time.

The BBC is a public service broadcaster and it has done a public service in exposing Nick Griffin.

I just wish he'd been on the programme sooner because I'm convinced the BNP would not have made the electoral inroads it has if the British people had seen him in action earlier.