MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENT: At last the biased BBC faces an opponent it can’t easily neutralise

Given its astonishing power, the BBC is actually examined and criticised far too little. The Corporation continues to live on a reputation gained long ago, when it was the voice of the embattled nation in wartime.

It is also treasured thanks to an age, now long gone, when its once-brilliant drama and light entertainment appealed to tens of millions.

On that basis, its Royal Charter is repeatedly renewed and its licence fee, now a sizeable tax, continues to survive and grow.

Of course, much of what the BBC does is still admirable. But much is not. Its increasingly undeserved financial security has led to the growth of arrogance and smugness inside the organisation.

This is obvious in the vast amounts it now pays to its favoured staff, taunting the poor pensioners who have to find the money for these Hollywood-style salaries (generally unmatched by Hollywood-style audiences).

But it is also shocking and blatant in its relentless, increasingly rigid adoption of a single set of opinions. Like the medieval church, it holds to a series of rigid, unalterable dogmas. Its priesthood of producers, commissioning editors and presenters are trained in nothing else, and live in professional and personal worlds where they encounter nothing else.

So they can barely conceive that any other view of the world even exists. Even dramas, comedy shows and panel games are affected.

If the BBC detects heresy inside its ranks, it first stamps on it and then silences it. Its major news programmes nowadays make little effort to disguise open hostility to the Conservative Government.

These dogmas began to take hold in the 1960s, especially under the leadership of the radical Director-General Sir Hugh Carleton Greene. But they are far more entrenched and far more ideological now than they were then.

In no other major institution has the ‘long march through the institutions’, promised by Left-wing radicals 50 years ago, taken place so thoroughly.

MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENT: In Nadine Dorries, the BBC has at last met an opponent who is not easily intimidated, co-opted or neutralised

For many years Tory governments have wondered what to do about this, and have decided to do little or nothing. It was a tough task, and the BBC is very capable of defending itself.

It can hugely influence the way a government (or an opposition) is seen by the public, without any technical breach of impartiality rules. It controls the national megaphone and does not lack supporters among Left-wing MPs, academics and other media. But in Nadine Dorries, the BBC has at last met an opponent who is not easily intimidated, co-opted or neutralised.

The Culture Secretary is an outsider – a working-class woman from Merseyside, the child of divorced parents. She went to a comprehensive school and grew up on a council estate. She has run a school in Africa and worked for the NHS. No Islington liberal is going to find it easy to make her feel guilty.

Her decision to pursue this policy is momentous and could change the whole national balance of power.

Apparently there is some puzzlement at the BBC that she might see a link between the licence fee – which she intends to freeze – and the issue of bias.

It is quite simple: if you want to run a partisan broadcasting organisation, then you should pay for it yourself and live on your own income. The quid pro quo is quite clear: the licence fee and the BBC’s very right to exist depend on its readiness to accept the rules of due impartiality.

But of course, the BBC will fight her with every weapon and dirty trick in its arsenal. Nadine Dorries deserves and must receive the unstinting support of Downing Street and of the Tory Party in the country.