Put the boot into the woke BBC to cheer us all up, Boris

So here we are, back where we started. Playing the Hokey Cokey – putting this bit in, putting that bit out – but this time not in the springtime of our hope but in the winter of our discontent.

For someone who wanted to be king of the world when he grew up, Boris Johnson is doing a really good impression of Greta Garbo these days. Sometimes it feels like he’s “ghosting” – the word the youngsters have for the practice of ending a personal relationship with someone by suddenly and without explanation withdrawing from all communication – the whole nation.

It’s understandable that one man can’t hold back the coronavirus, but in hard times such as these, we all need a circuit-break to the gloom and doom ahead, something which vivifies us and makes us realise that we can be the masters of our fate in other ways.

In lieu of Bonfire Night and Hallowe’en, how about a brisk defunding of the BBC? I’m sure that most of us could get behind putting a rocket under all those self-righteous metropolitans who work for it and treating them to a trick they’ll never forget. How odd to think that the BBC was once one of the main things that kept the nation’s morale up – during the Second World War, especially.

I dread to think how they’d react these days; no doubt we’d be instructed not to mindlessly rally round the flag against Germany in a jingoistic way – especially considering the racism of Churchill, in contrast with Hitler’s vegetarianism.

Only last month, the Tory MP Andrew Lever asked the Prime Minister a question about the fairness of having to pay a BBC licence in order to watch other TV channels in the UK: “When I buy a copy of the Mirror, the Mail or The Telegraph,

I’m not obliged to buy a copy of The Guardian. And yet when I want to watch live television on Sky or Amazon Prime or ITV, I am forced to pay for the BBC.”

To which the PM encouragingly replied: “We will be setting out a road map shortly for reform of the BBC and addressing the very issue that he mentions.”

When Lord Charles Moore was mooted as the new chairman, in the wake of the Rule, Britannia! row, you could smell the fear and fury of the woke all across the capital.

The BBC backed down in this instance, and we should keep them on the run. They’ll never reform themselves and to believe they will would be as foolish as expecting the best from the EU, another corrupted monolith with which they have so much in common; the endless entitlement, the fake enlightenment, the ceaseless spending of other people’s money.

Now more than ever, elderly people should not have to pay for their television licence, when the television may well be all the company they have for the next six months. Now more than ever, with the economy in freefall and millions of lives wrecked by Covid-related unemployment, it’s obscene that we are paying out-of-touch talking heads six-figure salaries. And now more than ever, as our country stands on the brink of a social sundering far greater than anything we have experienced since the civil war – North against South, pro-lockdown against antilockdown, British country against British country in a crumbling union – the last thing the British people need is yet another state-sponsored snowflake telling us how racist we are.

Step forward Countryfile presenter Ellie Harrison, who has announced that the countryside itself is racist: “In asking whether the countryside is racist, then yes it is; but asking if it’s more racist than anywhere else – maybe, maybe not.”

Institutions outlive their usefulness and at that point they change or they perish. “Nation shall speak peace to nation” (the BBC motto) and “United in diversity” (the EU motto) are amusingly interchangeable – and they are wearing thin, despite the oceans of money employed to paper over the cracks.

We don’t know where we’ll be t this time next year, so do put the boot in, Boris – give us some savage amusement till this nightmare before Christmas is over.