The title of this post may seem strange because the panel consists of five people, and TheEye may well have been tuning in specifically to listen to Chris Huhne. Stop laughing at the back.

Whether you are pro or anti-Griffin, it’s his presence which will overshadow the others on the night. Counting down to what will be one of the most spectacular Question Time broadcasts in its history, today the Conservatives have announced that Baroness Sayeeda Warsi will appear on the panel alongside him on 22nd October.

Mehdi Hasan at the New Statesman is delighted:

“I had been full of despair upon hearing the news that Bonnie Greer would be on the panel, along with the boring, uninspiring, middle-aged, middle-class white duo, Jack Straw (from Labour) and Chris Huhne (from the Lib Dems), and wondered why the BBC bosses and the three main parties seemed so unconcerned about the lack of a British-born ethnic-minority panellist or a British Muslim panellist to face off against the racist, Islamophobic Griffin.”

Mehdi (“great British name“, as Al Murray the Pub Landlord would say) of course writes with an agenda, but it’s worth examining dispassionately whether Warsi is a wise choice. Chosen over the Times suggestion of Hague, she ticks the born-in-Britain Muslim Tory box, and being a woman the strategists may consider that it would seem ungallant for her to be attacked too strongly. On the other hand she is unelected, which will be a vulnerability against an MEP with a bigger popular mandate from the voters than the rest of the panel combined. She’s also not a strong performer in this sort of arena and in the past has seemed weak outside of her Social Cohesion brief. A strong performance might help her previously mediocre scores from grassroots activists in the ConHome monthly survey of the Shadow Cabinet. All in all she seems to be a gamble by the Conservatives.

Jack Straw’s baggage for the event we covered on a previous All Seeing Eye post on this debate and Chris Huhne is irrelevant so there’s no point commenting further on him. The traditional extra-mouth-breather-on-the-end seat goes to somebody called Bonnie Greer. As an Anglo-American “playwrite and critic” you can already see why she is eminently qualified to be on the BBC’s poster broadcast of top-notch political debate. The fact she happens to be black will never have entered the producers’ minds.

As usual, Biased-BBC will be running a livechat of Question Time tomorrow evening and for every QT at 10:35pm UK time. Hosted by the unstoppable David Vance and assisted in moderation duties by your humble Eye, it is well worth joining in with. See you there!