When he finally left Question Time, he was stuck with newscasting, a non-job if ever there was one. However eminent a journalist the newscaster may be, he or she can never do more than fiddle with the edges of the main BBC bulletins. Sissons had plenty of time to look around him and dislike what he saw.

He doesn't quite skewer the complicated issue of the BBC's supposed institutional bias. What the BBC regards as normal and abnormal, what is moderate or extreme, where the centre of gravity of an issue lies, are conditioned by the common set of assumptions held by the people who work for it. These are uniformly middle class, well educated, living in north London, or maybe its Manchester equivalent. Urban, bright thirty-somethings with a pleasing record of achievement in a series of institutions, school, university, BBC, with little experience of — and perhaps not very well disguised contempt for — business, industry, the countryside, localness, traditions and politicians. The Guardian is their bible and political correctness their creed. In the Corporation's collective eye, Tony Benn is a lovable national treasure, Melanie Phillips a swivel-eyed fanatic. It's all very well-meaning, and painstakingly even-handed, but often notably adrift of the overriding national sentiment.

Sissons bowls over the other targets like a crusty old farmer shooting rabbits. Autocuties, "Elf ‘n' Safety", the Corporation's now pathological aversion to risk of any kind, its culture of conformity, its vulnerability to political pressure, its uncritical love affair with environmentalism, the callow opinionising of some of its reporters, the flatulent masses of its middle management and, as he sees it, the BBC's complete lack of leadership. Bang, bang, bang.

It's not entirely fair. Some of our bosses, Ron Neil, Tony Hall, Mark Damazer, Richard Sambrook, Helen Boaden, Mark Thompson himself, have been extraordinarily bright, decent and effective. Of course, there were, and are, plenty of totally transparent tossers. The BBC's difficulty is that it has never been able to tell the difference. In any case, it is the institution that increasingly seems to be the problem.

Sissons was finally shipwrecked by the Queen Mother, caught holding the parcel when she died, inconveniently, over a weekend when he had hardly any backup and the BBC, after a hundred rehearsals, had no plan. It wasn't as bad as it was subsequently painted, but feline empathy is not his strongest suit and the burgundy tie didn't help.

He was put out to the empty pastures of 24-hour news, a juicy target he disappointingly spares, and left to choose his own time to canter down to the knackers' yard and explode. The BBC is not as rudderless, its management not quite as spineless, its employees not quite as contemptuous of them as he makes out. But he is too good a reporter not to get a lot of it right. For those of us who love the place, and what it should stand for, these are worrying times.