And yet, although the people shouting about the Murdocracy are wrong about the present, they may be right about the future. For all the fine journalism it produces, News International is like a mafia family that has gone legit. Most of its business is respectable, but it retains the option of turning nasty to get its way. 

The Sun is where its gangsters hide. In the 1980s, it supported Margaret Thatcher and damned her enemies out of genuine ideological conviction. However, the Sun's support for the Tories brought it the added advantage of persuading the Thatcher government to allow the expansion of Murdoch's newspaper business. In the 1990s, it switched from the Tories to Labour. In return, for its feverish support for Tony Blair, Labour allowed BSkyB to evade the rules other broadcasters must obey. Last year, the Sun announced that it was backing David Cameron. Using every deceitful art at its disposal, it sought to convince its working- and lower-middle-class readers that they should elect Britain's 19th Old Etonian Prime Minister. As in the past, there is a price. It expects Cameron to deliver cuts to BBC budgets in return. The company's newspapers, like newspapers the world over, are seeing the internet wreck their finances, but if BSkyB can expand into the space left by a destabilised BBC, the profits will start rolling in again, and then perhaps it can chip away at the impartiality rules as well.

A section of Standpoint's readership may ask why it should not want to swap the BBC's liberal bias for the conservative bias of a privatised future. I would ask them to consider that BBC bias is mainly confined to Radio 4, and even there is found in particular presenters and programmes rather than across the station. Radio 4's controller is leaving, fortunately, and in any case, no one can pretend that the BBC as whole was campaigning for a liberal-left government last month. If it had even hinted that it might, its nervous managers would have U-turned at the first complaint.

More urgently, conservatives should wonder whether they should trust the BBC's enemies. The hypocrisy behind Campbell's encounter with Boulton was that the former's true complaint was not that the Sun was biased but that it was no longer biased in Labour's favour. Cameron is a fool if he doesn't know that one day the Sun will stand on its head and become an anti-Tory paper again. Then as now, there will be no ideological malice behind the switch in loyalties. It's business, not personal, as Gordon Brown realised in his final days when he complained that whereas he could have honest political arguments with, say, Paul Dacre of the Mail, executives in News International did not appear to care about history or politics or the battle of ideas — just money and showbiz.

Such empty-headed cynicism should remind you of the media oligarchs who fawn before Berlusconi and Putin in their search for favours while pumping out celebrity journalism and soft porn to the masses. Do you want such people to expand their control of British broadcasting, not because of their honest endeavours to win a larger audience share, but because of a fix by an inexperienced government looking for short-term advantage?

I am sorry to be the one to break this to conservative readers, but I am afraid that for all your justifiable reservations and all the BBC's inexcusable faults, you must join with the chanting lefties in Parliament Square. Deep breaths, you neo-cons. Sing it out, you mumbling libertarians. All together now: "Down with the Murdoch Empire! Watch the BBC!"