It is by any standards an impressive CV. But what distinguishes Jay, along with his achievement with Yes Minister/Prime Minister, is the hugely important contribution he has made in being one of very few on the cultural landscape to talk about the bias of the BBC and the mindset of the metropolitan liberal elite from which it springs. 

"My stint coincided almost exactly with Macmillan's premiership," he wrote in a Centre for Policy Studies booklet of his early BBC days, "and I do not think my ex-colleagues would quibble if I said we were not exactly diehard supporters. But we were not just anti-Macmillan; we were anti-industry, anti-capitalism, anti-advertising, anti-selling, anti-profit, anti-patriotism, anti-monarchy, anti-Empire, anti-police, anti-armed forces, anti-bomb, anti-authority. Almost anything that made the world a freer, safer and more prosperous place, you name it, we were anti it...It was (and is) essentially, though not exclusively, a graduate phenomenon. From time to time it finds an issue that strikes a chord with the broad mass of the nation, but in most respects it is wildly unrepresentative of national opinion." This "media liberalism", he added, has accelerated and intensified in the decades since he ceased being a BBC employee. 

Jay did not stop at such analysis, but went on to produce a possible blueprint for the future of the corporation. In How to Save the BBC, published by the Centre for Policy Studies in 2008, he suggested that the days of the licence fee were over, but that the BBC, as a great contributor to the nation, was worth preserving in a different form. He recommended that the corporation should be limited to just one national TV channel and one national radio station. They would together produce the type of programming which wouldn't get made on the commercial channels. This restructured BBC would be self-funding. 

Many inside as well as outside the media have become convinced by this argument. What was important about his intervention in the debate about the BBC is that it came not from the pen of a Daily Mail leader-writer or a Conservative backbench MP but from one of our most skilled writers, an important figure from what have now become known as the "creative industries". If only there were more like him.