Certainly, people who care about serious cultural broadcasting need to think about this now, and to start to plan. By far the most important of Lord Reith’s celebrated three purposes of the BBC was to educate. There will be precious little of that if Radio 3 goes, and its absence would shame a supposedly civilised people.

However, politicians rarely seem concerned about culture or civilisation, and they seem not to have thought that deeply about the BBC in general. Having heard MPs from all parties whine about the BBC’s bias for the nearly 40 years I have been writing about politics, I long ago concluded it was not really biased at all in a party political sense. Even in a Corporation deemed as full of Bolsheviks as the BBC, there is always someone – including among the Bolsheviks themselves – who can be found to say something disobliging about some aspect of the Labour party; and as for the Lib Dems, the BBC seems hardly these days to notice their existence at all.

As I heard the strictures of Nadine Dorries, the Culture Secretary, on Monday in the House of Commons about the future of the Corporation, I reflected that the BBC had had this coming for some time. It is not party-political bias that is the problem: it is the liberal (and I use the word in the American sense) mindset that it instinctively applies to any question in a way that probably 70 or 80 per cent of its viewers and listeners do not. 

The BBC has been in the vanguard of what we now call “woke”: first respecting, then adopting, every trendy posture, trope and idea that comes along. And, in the quest for a younger audience, it seems to have done this because it believes a high proportion of young people hold these views. They may be right, thanks to the nature of the indoctrination that they now receive in what passes for their university education. Sadly for the BBC, it won’t be long before many of these young people grow up intellectually, and find its tone offensive too.