I apologise for these old comments and withdraw them unreservedly and the upset that they have caused.

A Reform UK spokesman initially said: "Through offence archaeology the BBC has found that Mr Gribbin has made a series of comments about a number of subjects.

They keep making this sound like something that happened a long time ago but he wrote all this stuff in 2022! Next they’ll tell us he was a younger man and it was actually socially acceptable in those days to be neutral on Hitler.