RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Why is the BBC fawning over migrants given free bed and board, wifi and a bus into town?

This is the BBC News. There now follows a partly political broadcast on behalf of asylum seekers.

Delivered in the same, hand-wringing tone as those daytime TV adverts featuring bedraggled African children drinking dirty water out of polluted rivers, or appealing to you to give £2 a month to a donkey sanctuary, this alleged piece of ‘journalism’ was in my opinion pure Leftist propaganda.

Presented by correspondent Dan Johnson, with all the credulity of a gullible first-year media studies student intent on a career on the Guardian, it sought to make us all feel guilty over the plight of vulnerable young men banged up on the floating asylum hostel, Bibby Stockholm.

Beginning with a report on the funeral in Tirana of 27-year-old Leonard Farruku, who took his own life on board the barge moored off the Dorset coast, it segued seamlessly into an ‘exclusive’ interview with an asylum seeker from Sierra Leone who had been forced to share his cabin — sorry, ‘cell’.

The Bibby Stockholm barge was moored off the Dorset coast when 27-year-old Leonard Farruku took his own life on board

Yusuf Deen Kargbo, 20, ‘speaking for the first time’, warned that others might also kill themselves if conditions on the Bibby Stockholm didn’t improve drastically.

‘They’re saying this is just the beginning. They are trying to give a warning, that this place is not good for them. Every day their stress is getting worse.’

Mr Kargbo won’t be one of them, happily. The tragic death of his room-mate brought up his number on the escape committee and he is now safely tucked up in a hotel on dry land. But he’s still in touch with many of his former inmates of the Good Ship Alcatraz.

Johnson listened sympathetically as Mr Kargbo, apparently reading from a Twitter feed as he scrolled through his mobile phone, complained that ‘the stress and anxiety and poor quality of the food, this barge feels like a prison’.

A prison, as Johnson didn’t point out, where the inmates are free to come and go as they please and provided with a complimentary shuttle bus service into nearby Weymouth.

Still, to add to the indignity, the wifi is frequently on the blink and the showers run cold. Potentially with further fatal consequences. As Johnson warned gravely: ‘There are warnings about where this could lead.’

A man arranges flowers at the funeral of Leonard Farruku, who died on the Bibby Stockholm barge in December

Kargbo told him: ‘They said if every day their stress is increasing, it’s getting worse, it’s getting worse, so they will decide to even kill themselves because they don’t have any hope for their life.’

Not once did Johnson bother to question any of these lurid claims. Nor did he remind Kargbo — or the viewers who pay his wages — that Bibby Stockholm ‘residents’ get three free meals a day, a TV lounge, a fully-equipped gym and a dedicated medical clinic.

So no surprise there, then. That’s simply par for the course, when it comes to the BBC’s fawning coverage of asylum seekers.

For instance, on its website BBC News tells us merely that Kargbo ‘came to the UK from Sierra Leone’ — without mentioning that he did a runner after competing in the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham in 2022.

In BBC Land, all migrants are ‘vulnerable’ and ‘fleeing persecution’ and anyone who argues otherwise is a heartless, knuckle-scraping racist.

Why else would it give headline news coverage to the funeral in Tirana of an Albanian asylum seeker? Tragically, people in Britain take their own lives every day without being afforded a send-off with full honours on the BBC’s flagship lunchtime bulletin.

We can never be certain why they commit suicide, but in the case of Mr Farruku, a coroner was told there were no suspicious circumstances.

Yusuf Kargbo told the BBC that his room-mate didn’t seem unhappy and he often heard him laughing, assuming he was watching a comedy video on his mobile.

The Guardian quoted Mr Farruku’s sister Jola as saying he was ‘full of humour’, although the Daily Telegraph reports that she said her brother ‘turned into a different person’ after their mother died three years ago — something the Guardian forgot to mention.

Jola, who lives in Lombardy, Italy, also said: ‘He had lots of friends in Albania and maintained strong relationships with them’. In which case, why move to Britain, where he ended up on a ‘prison ship’?

Albania is a safe country. Britain has signed a treaty allowing ‘asylum seekers’ to be returned there. If Mr Farruku was unhappy in his home country, why didn’t he move to Italy to be nearer his sister?

These are, of course, the kind of questions we’re not supposes to ask. And the BBC never will. They appear to prefer to peddle the false narrative that Britain is a racist hell-hole which hates foreigners and is happy to condemn asylum seekers to inhuman conditions where they have no alternative but to kill themselves.

Migrants are frequently picked up in the English Channel after attempting to make the crossing in small boats

The fact that tens of thousands of migrants, including Yusuf Hargbo, are now living in hotels at a cost to the British taxpayer of £8million a day clearly doesn’t count.

As the row over Rwanda rumbles on and the small boats keep on coming, the courts continue to indulge asylum claims on the most spurious grounds. An immigration judge has just refused to repatriate a Serbian national because, having lived here illegally for many years since he was 13, he claims he’s forgotten how to speak Serb.

You couldn’t make it up. I haven’t done French since I failed O-level half a century ago, but I can just about get by in France, after a fashion. Surely if he spoke Serb until he was a teenager, he must remember something.

And, anyway, what about the hundreds of thousands of immigrants living in closed communities in Britain who can’t, or won’t, speak English? Should they all now be sent home?

Curiously enough, I couldn’t find any mention of the Serbian story on the BBC. No, it seems they’re only interested in tales of vulnerable migrants being ill-treated by a heartless (far-Right Tory) Government, pandering to the basest instincts of racist local residents objecting to having hundreds of uninvited young foreign men dumped in their midst after arriving here illegally.

As far as the BBC is concerned, Soft-Touch Britain doesn’t count as ‘news’.