People who like to consider themselves reasonable think it’s unreasonable to call for the BBC to lose the licence fee. They acknowledge that the Corporation gets things wrong.
But then they regurgitate a list of things which - supposedly - only an organisation inoculated from market forces can deliver. The Last Night of the Proms, Test Match Special, natural history programmes, Teletubbies. Whatever.
Increasingly, however, even these ‘reasonable’ folks find that their roll call of national treasures grows shorter. Match of the Day? Seriously, after Lineker’s tweets? Doctor Who? It’s one long sixth-form sociology lecture. Costume drama like Wolf Hall? Only the BBC would cast an actress who looked like Shamima Begum as an actual character from medieval English history (Cardinal Wolsey’s daughter, no less).
Output, which used to act as a benchmark for commercial rivals, has been downgraded to agitprop pulp.
But it’s the jewel in the crown of BBC apologetics, which has really lost its lustre. BBC News, we were told, was a world leader in impartial, unbiased reportage and analysis. The very antidote to ‘fake news’, with its own (comically pompous) fact-checking service, ‘BBC Verify’.
How hollow those boasts now sound.
It’s not just scandals over disgraced on-screen personnel like Huw Edwards or Martin Bashir, who forged his way into getting an interview with Princess Diana. Rogue operators can be hard to spot. But even principled journalists have come a cropper.
This week, for instance, Corporation bosses rebuked newsreader Martine Croxall for having the temerity to roll her eyes when forced to read a reality-defying script referencing “pregnant people”, rather than “women”.
In normal times, that might be enough egg-on-the-face for one week. But these are not normal times. Thanks to a whistle-blower, The Daily Telegraph has published extraordinary revelations about baked-in bias at BBC News. They are serious enough for even reasonable people to be in no doubt that the Corporation cannot be allowed to survive in its current form.
The Telegraph’s disclosures confirmed what many of us have been saying for years. That on Gaza, the BBC is not an honest broker of information. That on trans-issues, the newsroom is in hock to ideological thought-police. But the real stinker is what we learned about the BBC’s anti-Trump positioning.
On one level, this comes as no surprise. Anyone who has had to endure the scarcely veiled contempt for Trump shown by the BBC’s on-screen personalities will have had their misgivings.
It’s even there in the voices of BBC Radio newsreaders. These are people we can’t even see, but who contrive to signal their disapproval of Trump through tone and inflexion of voice alone.
But to hear how far the Corporation was prepared to go to portray President Trump as a stock pantomime villain - incapable of doing right, always doing wrong - came as an electric shock for those minded to give the BBC the benefit of the doubt.
The BBC's bias against Trump is the opening salvo. The dogfight begins when Reform enters No10 - Colin Brazier
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We now know that the Corporation’s flagship documentary program, Panorama, edited a speech given by the president to make it sound like he was inciting insurrection when, in fact, he was urging peaceful protest.
This is about as devious an act of journalistic sophistry as it’s possible to imagine. And the target wasn’t just anyone. The BBC, our state broadcaster, had set out to defame the leader of Britain’s most powerful ally. A breathtaking act of national self-harm.
It’s obviously hypocritical. An organisation which seeks to win an advantage over competitors (like GB News) by emphasising its probity turns out to be a giant prig.
Sanctimonious about journalistic ethics, the BBC is no better than the rest. Worse, given that it expects to be paid to produce its one-sided output on pain of prosecution for those who refuse to cough up.
But, for me, the hypocrisy of the BBC is personal. In 2003, I was sent to Iraq as a TV reporter ‘embedded’ with the American army.
One of my Sky News colleagues, a distinguished foreign correspondent called James Furlong, was similarly embedded with the Royal Navy. He filed a report from on board a British submarine, and included pictures of missiles being fired from beneath the waves.
Within weeks of the invasion, the BBC ran a documentary about the war. As part of the pre-broadcast publicity, they ran a story about Forlong’s submarine piece, alleging that he had misled viewers by using ‘library’ footage, rather than material his camera operator had filmed while a guest of the Navy.
To maximise the impact of their story, they shared it with The Guardian, the BBC’s ideological soul-mate in print. Within days, James Forlong had left Sky. Three months later, he hanged himself.
Now, no suicide can ever be wholly blamed on one thing. But I don’t think it requires much imagination to see that the BBC’s desire to do down a commercial rival led, indirectly, to the death of a decent and honourable man.
It was not their wish, clearly. But, looking back on those two decades, I have never forgotten that the BBC’s attempts to be holier-than-thou are not borne out by actions.
The BBC's bias against Trump is well known. Less well known is the Corporation's determination to squeeze rivals by means fair and foul, sometimes at great cost to those involved.
If Reform wins the next election - as I believe they will - I hope they will have the courage which has evaded the Conservatives, and abolish the licence fee.
The BBC, knowing this is likely, will throw the kitchen sink at stopping the Reform bandwagon. The sort of bias the BBC revealed when it came to other nation-defining moments of history, the Brexit vote and the migration crisis, will be as nothing compared to the stealthy exertions the Corporation will expend to ensure Nigel Farage never enters Number Ten.
There will be many ‘reasonable’ people who will insist that Reform would be mad to risk a fight to the death with the BBC. Better to promise to leave the licence fee in place, and avoid the Corporation’s firepower being brought to bear on Reform in the run-up to 2029.
But this is a counsel of despair. The BBC is irredeemably, endemically - almost genetically - biased against the Right (or ‘far right’ as it prefers).
We are long beyond the point where reasonable people can insist it does more good than harm. No, the BBC has shown by its actions that it has no place left in our public square as a state-subsidised broadcaster. Even reasonable people, I think, can now see the truth of that.