It was crass to let Andrew Neil treat the PM as a naughty boy. But Boris’s bullying makes me fear for the BBC

THE party leader started getting angry about three minutes into the interview. After five minutes he was spluttering with rage.

By the time the interview came to an end he was almost incoherent. And as he left the studio the wrath had turned to threats. Never again would he agree to be interviewed by that bloody woman on this wretched (he used a ruder word) programme.

No, this was not Jeremy Corbyn nor Boris Johnson nor any other leader from the general election that has been giving us all such pleasure. This was John Smith in 1992, the relatively new leader of the Labour Party, and his interviewer was the impeccably courteous Sue MacGregor.

Perjury

Sadly, Mr Smith was to die less than two years later but, as a relatively new presenter on Today, I was to see many instances of top politicians turning on us for one reason or another. The former chairman of the Conservative Party, Norman (now Lord) Tebbit, once threatened live on air to sue me — and that was before I had managed to blurt out my first question. Something in my tone as I introduced him perhaps?

I should have been prepared. On an earlier visit to Broadcasting House, the head of radio, who’d gone to greet Tebbit, said he’d bawled at him as he walked into the lobby: ‘You f*****g c**t!’

Another top Tory tried to get me sacked for ‘poisoning the well of democratic debate’ with my style of interviewing and called on his colleagues to boycott Today.

He was Jonathan Aitken and he subsequently served time at Her Majesty’s pleasure for committing perjury. Nothing to do with me, guv.

I could fill the rest of this page with examples of politicians turning on the BBC — often the Today programme. Sometimes the issues have been trivial, sometimes crucially important, such as the Iraq war and the appalling Newsnight accusations against the innocent former Tory Treasurer Lord McAlpine, over which the director- general resigned within a few hours of my interview with him.

But the row that’s rattling the china in Broadcasting House as I write is something different. Not so much because of the accusations of bias being made against the BBC but because of the context and the underlying threat.

My old friend Justin Webb was right to dismiss with scorn yesterday an attack by the Shadow Transport Secretary Andy McDonald on the BBC political correspondent Alex Forsyth, who had referred to Boris Johnson potentially winning a ‘majority that he so deserves’.

She had done what we’ve all done a thousand times and used by mistake the wrong word at the end of a very, very long night when she was dogtired. It’s happened to all of us.

But McDonald seized it as proof of her support for Boris Johnson. It was nonsense, but typical of the desperate measures both sides have used to prove that the BBC has been inherently biased in the campaign. A bit tricky, you might think, for the BBC to be simultaneously biased against the Tories and Labour, but that’s how it is with these things.

Much more worrying are the threats emanating from Number 10. Again, in some respects, there’s nothing new in them. The days when TV interviewers treated politicians with fawning deference disappeared with the arrival of the likes of Robin Day and Alastair Burnet.

I can’t think of a single prime minister in the past half century who would not, at some point in their career, have despatched the BBC directorgeneral to Devil’s Island if they’d thought they could get away with it.

Margaret Thatcher managed to get Alasdair Milne fired by appointing the true blue Tory Marmaduke Hussey to be chairman of the board of governors. He did what was asked of him.

But DGs come and DGs go and the BBC tends to sail on regardless. When Mr Johnson raises the question of the licence fee, though, we are entering infinitely more dangerous waters. Make no mistake, this is an existential threat to the BBC.

It’s not that he could scrap the fee next week or next year, even if he had every MP in the House behind him. It’s part of the Charter under which the BBC operates and it lasts for ten years. The present Charter was agreed in 2017, so there’s quite a long time to run.

But what Johnson is threatening to do is ‘decriminalise’ non-payment of the licence fee.

At present, if you refuse to pay it you get fined, and if you refuse to pay the fine you go to jail. Without that sanction, many fear, the fee becomes less a legal requirement and more a voluntary agreement.

Add to that the massive threat the BBC is facing from its digital challengers, such as Netflix and Amazon, and the fact that vast numbers of young people much prefer their phones to the telly and you begin to see the soft underbelly of the organisation exposed.

But does it matter beyond the confines of the selfobsessed media world?

Duty

True, it was probably pretty crass to allow Andrew Neil to turn to the camera at the end of his interview with Nigel Farage and tick off Johnson for refusing to be interviewed by him as though he were a headmaster and young Boris a very, very naughty boy.

It was more crass that so many BBC bulletins made it their lead story. It was positively not the most important story of the day — and that’s what leads are meant to be.

The fact is though, like it or not, politicians are free to choose whether to accept invitations for interviews. Sadly, the media do not have the power of subpoena.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t draw it to the attention of the audience. Johnson and Corbyn have been boycotting Today for a very long time, and I and my colleagues have often ‘empty chaired’ them. By which I mean we had drawn it to the attention of the listener that they had chosen not to appear. That’s our duty. Otherwise the listener might think it was we who were denying them an appearance.

As a former Today presenter, I’m saddened and worried that they have been boycotting us — and, we are told, that Johnson’s government will continue to do so. I believe the listener is entitled to hold people in power to account. It enables democracy. And answering pre- selected questions on social media is not being held to account.

Boycott

For what it’s worth, I doubt whether a Government boycott will stick, though. There will be many occasions when the new Government will have important announcements to make or positions to defend. Can they really ignore an audience of seven million politically engaged listeners, many of whom both like and trust the BBC and regard phones as things you use for making calls? Maybe a PM can get away with appearing only on comfy sofas on the breakfast telly shows. But it’s not a good look. That’s what dictators do.

The bigger question is the effect Johnson’s bully-boy tactics are likely to have on the BBC. Over my 50 years there, I’ve seen how the atmosphere on news programmes can change when there’s a sense that the Government is out to get us. Producers become a little more timid, more inclined to ask: ‘Are you sure we can say this?’

There is, of course, an upside for a programme like Today, as some listeners will have spotted. Instead of asking the same old questions of the obligatory Minister for Whatever at 8.10 or 8.30, they’ve been able to listen to conversations that have nothing whatsoever to do with the latest political spat.

And it seems many have enjoyed it. Maybe it’ll catch on. Good for listening figures. Maybe not so good for our old friend democracy. I’m not saying that it can’t survive without a robust BBC holding the Government to account. But it’s a risk I personally would much prefer not to take.