The Left bangs on about the “evil” power of Rupert Murdoch and of the Daily Mail, but the BBC dwarfs them as a news provider. A 2013 report by Ofcom suggested that the BBC accounts for 44 per cent of people’s consumption of news, taking into account television, newspapers, radio and the internet. Murdoch’s national newspapers, including the Sun, speak for just 4 per cent. Other surveys have put the Corporation’s share higher. It is true, of course, that tabloid newspapers are more explicitly propagandist than Auntie, even when she is pulling out the anti-Tory stops. But the BBC has the sheer numbers. Moreover, its spectacularly well-resourced website is alleged by national newspaper publishers to have hastened the decline in print circulations, while the Corporation’s extensive coverage of local news is plausibly said to have had a similar effect on the dwindling sales of local newspapers.

Proving that the BBC abuses its enormous power by leaning to the Left, and sometimes giving Tories a hard time, is quite easy. Its historical tendencies in this direction were conceded by Mark Thompson, its then director-general, who said in 2010 that there was a “massive bias to the Left” when he joined the BBC in 1979, which was directed against Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s. He suggested that this bias has ended but did not offer any reason as to why it should have done so. The BBC attracts the same sort of journalists (8,000 of them at the last count, more than in the whole of Fleet Street) and generally leaves them to their own devices. Indeed, Mr Thompson seemingly implied that they continue to have their political blind spots. In July 2011 he wrote in a magazine article that “there have been occasions when the BBC, like the rest of the UK media, was very reticent about talking about immigration”.

If the Tories can reasonably consider themselves hard done by during the election, UKIP is entitled to think it was taken to the cleaners by the Corporation. Despite Ofcom’s decree that it should be treated as a “major party” on the same basis as Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems, it was regularly tacked on to the end of BBC political reports, and sometimes entirely ignored. In one television debate Nigel Farage was barracked by a BBC-selected audience that appeared predominantly anti-UKIP. When grilled by Newsnight’s Evan Davis Mr Farage was treated as though he was batty or an extremist or both, though when Mr Davis came to interview the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon, he was full of smiles and reassurance.

By way of further supporting evidence, let me point out that the editor of Newsnight, Ian Katz, is a former deputy editor of the Guardian, its political editor hails from the same newspaper, and its economics editor was previously an economist at the TUC. Ask yourself whether it is imaginable for the editor and political editor of the most important current affairs programme to have worked for the Daily Telegraph, or for its economics editor to have cut his teeth at the Institute of Economic Affairs. The answer is obviously “No” — as it is equally inconceivable that an ex-Tory cabinet minister would be appointed as the £300,000-a-year “director of strategy and digital”, as the former Labour cabinet minister James Purnell was in 2013. The same point can be made about the centre-Left participants who monopolise the Beeb’s satirical and culture shows. Sometimes it seems as though Tony Hall, director-general, as well as its head of news, James Harding, are ’avin’ a larf.

I don’t doubt there are many fine journalists working for Auntie who strive to be neutral and objective, and often succeed in being so. But with a few exceptions they are what they are — metropolitan, conventional members of the slightly left-wing cultural elite, wary of Tories and their strange antediluvian beliefs. Appointing right-wing BBC chairmen or director-generals won’t affect the direction of travel, as Margaret Thatcher discovered in the 1980s. It is surely instructive that almost every BBC journalist to whom one talks is convinced that the organisation is even-handed.