BBC apologises for 'ridiculing' Redwood

The footage was used to accompany coverage of his announcement of Tory plans to slash red tape, to which it bore no relevance.

Faced with accusations of anti-Tory bias and gratuitously trying to make the former Cabinet minister look foolish, the corporation's director of news Helen Boaden admitted it was "wrong" to use the clip.

As head of the Conservative Party's economic competitiveness policy group, Mr Redwood announced at the weekend a raft of proposals to cut bureaucracy for businesses by £14billion.

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A string of BBC bulletins illustrated the story with images of a notorious gaffe he made shortly after becoming Welsh Secretary in 1993.

The film showed a public event where Mr Redwood tried - and failed - to sing the Welsh national anthem.

The camera focused on him miming badly and making it obvious he did not know the words.

Following a string of complaints from furious Tory activists, Miss Boaden conceded the corporation was wrong to dig out the clip.

"In retrospect we weren't right to use the footage again, which came from a long time ago," she said.

She rejected criticism that the corporation had focused too strongly on Labour rebuttals of Mr Redwood's tax-cutting plans.

"There can be a temptation sometimes to present stories as merely matters of party politics, but we believe that we gave good consideration to the substance of the proposals," she said.

Mr Redwood, who will today unveil plans to introduce road-charging for lorries to fund £10billion of highway improvements, said he was "very pleased" with the climbdown.

"The intention was to ridicule me and the policy by the use of outdated and irrelevant film.

"I hope the BBC does not do it again. Nobody else gets that kind of treatment.

"It was intended to prejudice people's responses against very sensible proposals."

The charging plan for heavy goods vehicles, drafted by the same economic competitiveness group under Mr Redwood, will be formally unveiled today.

It will recommend that hauliers are charged for every mile they drive.

Money clawed in will make up a £10billion fund to pay for road improvement schemes, including flyovers in cities and traffic sensors, to keep vehicles moving and reduce gridlock.

But British hauliers would be compensated because the duty on diesel would be reduced dramatically.

This, say the Tories, would iron out the "competitive disadvantage" British truckers face because hauliers in Europe currently pay only half as much for their diesel.