"MIND your own business, you yellow-toothed, tea-drinking cowards!" That was just one of the more printable responses from American citizens to readers of The Guardian newspaper telling them to vote for Kerry in the presidential election.

O joy! O joy! Forgive me for this moment of gloating, but it's such a wonderful thing to see a sanctimonious sepulchre as The Guardian get its come-uppance. I haven't laughed so much since they decided to cancel a rally about global warming one June Saturday - because it was too cold.

My pleasure is doubled because I was told off by The Guardian the other week. The day after the terrorists imprisoned those hundreds of children at the school in Beslan, they released 32 of them and The Guardian, anxious as ever to say something flattering about our enemies, printed a banner headline ACT OF HUMANITY.

I wrote to the paper to complain about this. By this time the terrorists had slaughtered more than 300 of the children. The Guardian replied accusing me of "hindsight". How blinkered can a "progressive" newspaper get? It wasn't "hindsight" that infuriated me: it was The Guardian's lack of foresight - its failure to recognise those murderous thugs for what they were. Or worse, its unwillingness to ascribe evil motives to Russia's enemies. I recalled, however, that The Guardian was never slow to ascribe evil motives to Russia's enemies in the old days when some of us quoted Stalin and described the Greenham Common women and other ban-the-bomb protestors as communism's "useful idiots".

But wait - my joy last week was unconfined. One of the Guardian readers who wrote to the American people telling them how to vote was the extremely modern and right-on atheist biologist, Richard Dawkins. The gist of Dawkins's advice to the great American people was that a vote for Bush would mean a vote for Martin's Law. You remember Mr Martin - he was the man imprisoned for killing an intruder. Dawkins's advice rebounded on him, for Americans generally approve of people shooting burglars who break into their homes. You would think Dawkins - a "Professor of Understanding" - would have "researched" that point.

When you think about it, there is a gross impudence in the assumed right to tell the people of other nations how to vote in their elections. You can imagine the outrage in the offices of the righteous Guardian if a posse of US cowboys wrote to tell English voters that they ought to throw out Dennis Skinner, Robin Cook and Clare Short. Come to think of it, perhaps I am misjudging The Guardian. Maybe they would defend foreigners' rights to interfere in our affairs on the grounds of free speech? Free speech? But, as Arthur Schopenhauer tellingly remarked: "Why do people clamour for freedom of speech when they already have freedom of thought - but don't use it?" Just like The Guardian in the Beslan "hindsight" incident.

I had better come clean and confess to an overwhelming bias against anything The Guardian says. You see, my confidence in its ordinary use of the English language was destroyed for ever back in the 1970s. Workers were out on strike somewhere - as they usually were in that decade. And some other workers downed tools in their support. The Guardian solemnly reported that the strike in sympathy would "add impetus to the stoppage".

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange