But then broadcasting came along in the 1920s and we decided we would replicate the idea of Henry VIII's establishment in the airwaves. We did it in quite a Henry VIII way actually, because we didn't allow any competition to start with and then we only allowed some competition very reluctantly. And we did it in the name of values, believing that we were doing something wonderfully British, and good, and deep, and "Nation shall speak peace unto nation" and all the rest of it. That seems to me to be a very difficult thing to defend in any free society, but I do acknowledge that in the early days the BBC took those values seriously. I would not wish for a broadcasting system to be constructed in that way, but there's no doubt that it did try. Therefore it produced very high quality programmes. 

That seems to me to have long disappeared and the coherence has been lost, and it's become much more imperial. And it's partly because it feels it has to capture every area of broadcasting. So the church has lost its way but not unfortunately lost its power and its money, and that seems to me to be wrong, and illiberal. And the fact that most of the people who run the BBC are called "liberals" in the sense that those are their political views... 

CB: By whom?

CM: In general, they would be recognised as what people mean by liberal. It's undeniable that the ethos of the BBC is liberal in the sense that people use that word meaning "vaguely lefty".

CB: You mean like Andrew Neil? You call him liberal?

CM: No, but he doesn't run it. On the whole it's undeniable that the ethos of the BBC is liberal in the sense that people use that word meaning "vaguely lefty".

CB: Well, it's plainly deniable, because there was a rather good article in the New Statesman recently, saying that the BBC is a rather right-wing organisation. I don't believe that either.

CM: I'm saying these people are "liberals" but nevertheless it is an illiberal system. If you tell this to an American they can scarcely believe that it's against the law to watch live television in this country unless you pay money to the BBC. 

CB: The same American will tell you that he wishes he had a broadcasting service producing as high-quality, impartial news and current affairs and drama as the BBC. The two go together. And because you don't like, for reasons of free market purity, the system of funding, you find it difficult to recognise the strength of the BBC's output.

CM: It's not really a free-market point — it's a freedom point. And I don't agree with the idea that we have impartial news. Let's take the best of all BBC news programmes — the Today programme: you can always tell by the way it's presented who's in the dock and who's the hero. First, that's not the way an impartial programme should be done. Second, the person who is usually in the dock is a person who is considered to be bad from a soft left-liberal position. It's not something you could prove in a court of law, but it's perfectly obvious to me. For example, how many times would there be a thing on the Today programme in which an industrial producer was the hero of a story about the environment and Friends of the Earth was the villain? How often would it be the case that an anti-homosexual preacher was the hero and a gay rights advocate was the villain? How often would it be the case that an Ulster Unionist was the hero and an Irish nationalist was the villain? I think you honestly couldn't deny that those things were discernible.