It was a late night watching the US presidential election with friends last night. We devoured food and beer until dawn in honour of the widespread appetite for excess stateside.

A lot has already been written about Barack Obama, and bloggers today will be writing much more about him, I’m sure. So I want to dwell on one guest on the live BBC coverage of election night, presented by David Dimbleby. That guest was the moustachioed Republican John Bolton, a previous US ambassador to the UN.

Bolton was not happy as the bleak results for Republicans kept rolling in. ‘He should dye his moustache and shave off his politics,’ said a friend as we watched him have an argument with BBC correspondent Katty Kay before telling Dimbleby that the BBC should sack another of their correspondents, Rajesh Mirchandani, who had just finished a live interview in Colorado.

Dimbleby asked Bolton what he thought perceptions of the Obama presidency would be across the world. But Bolton wasn’t reading from the same script.

‘First I’ll give you a perception from America: you should fire that reporter that you just had on in Colorado,’ he said. ‘That man was not conducting an interview; he was having an argument.’

It’s not the first time that Bolton has had a run-in with the BBC – Jeremy Paxman once gave him one of his trademark grillings, about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

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