The BBC’s power and privilege are safe under David Cameron

Despite misgivings over the licence fee and market share, senior Tories are not out to dismember Auntie

Armando Iannucci is one of the finest satirists of our age. His political characters – in The Thick

of It, In the Loop and Veep – are so funny because they contain so much truth; an exaggeration, but not much of one. This week, at the Edinburgh Festival, he unveiled a new act: a television luvvie, hysterical about the very notion of the BBC being asked to slim down. The Tories who harbour such dark thoughts, he said, are like doctors urging their patients “to consider the benefits of assisted suicide”. So to trim the BBC is to kill it off entirely; a hilarious extrapolation, worthy of Malcolm Tucker himself.

The fact that Iannucci was entirely serious, and genuinely holds such views, does not make them any less comic. They sum up a paranoid attitude that seems to have gripped the corporation since it realised that a Tory government, rather than a Labour one, would be reviewing the terms of its Charter.

The review process is a once-in-adecade chance for a government to impose conditions on the BBC, and ask questions such as: why does it have so many digital radio stations? Do you really need so many bureaucrats? If you believe that Tories are inherently wicked, as a few in the corporation do, then you may believe that the end is nigh.

In fact, the Prime Minister admits, in private, that he’s quite happy with the BBC and is baffled by colleagues who loathe it. He grumbles about Nick Robinson having kept him awake by filming reports outside his bedroom in No 10, but his animus doesn’t run much deeper. His wife, Samantha, has been his personal BBC monitor. She is an avid fan of 6 Music, its digital-only radio station, and alerts the Prime Minister if she hears a story going badly for his government in its morning news bulletin. He then scrambles his spin team and if the story is fixed in time for 6 Music’s lunchtime bulletin, he’s happy.

There are Tories who would love to dismember the BBC, but they’re not in positions of power. John Whittingdale, the Culture Secretary, was hawkish on the BBC during the election campaign, when bookmakers gave the Tories a 10-1 chance of being able to do anything about it. But in power, he is cooling quickly; when speaking at the Edinburgh Festival earlier this week, he even dropped his criticism of

Strictly Come Dancing. Mr Cameron’s overall feeling is that he doesn’t want to be drawn into a “never-ending argument”.

So why the panic? Perhaps because any rational analysis of the BBC highlights several anomalies crying out for change – and none bigger than the licence fee. It may have once made sense that those who wanted a newfangled television screen should pay for the cost of the programmes too. Today, high-quality television is provided by a wide range of broadcasters, and even British-dominated drama such as Game of

Thrones is made by Americans (in Belfast). Sky Arts has proven that commercial stations can do highbrow just as well as state broadcasting; never have British viewers had more stations to choose from. But only the BBC has the power to jail its non-customers.

Every week some 3,500 are hauled through a magistrate’s court on the BBC’s behalf, making up one in eight criminal prosecutions. As the convictions mount, the ugly side of Auntie is becoming harder to ignore. Even devoted fans of the BBC can wish it were self-financing, simply to stop the prosecutions. I’m a voracious consumer of BBC’s output, and would happily pay the licence fee for John Humphrys alone (or CBeebies). But indefensibly, my BBC addiction is subsidised by families who need £145.50 more than they need more TV channels. The debate about the licence fee is becoming one of basic fairness, yet it’s a debate that Mr Cameron is likely to duck. He has asked the BBC to finance the free licences for the over-75s, and has decided to leave it at that.

The other problem is the BBC’s market share. While it likes to describe newspapers as all-powerful entities run by ocean-going villains such as Rupert Murdoch, the truth is that newspaper sales have almost halved since the BBC Charter was last reviewed 10 years ago. Today, 53 per cent of the public get news from BBC One, and its website is read by far more people than any newspaper. Publishing moguls have had their day; the Beeb is the hegemon now, as politicians know. Oliver Letwin, one of Mr Cameron’s closest advisers, has for years argued that newspapers are influential only insofar as they inform what the BBC says.

With this power comes the potential to abuse power. Why, you might ask, did the charity Kids Company ask Alan Yentob, the BBC’s creative director, to serve as its chairman? Certainly not for his ability to run things, as the charity’s collapse attests. But he was useful when it came to dealing with a pesky £590,000 tax bill. Yentob said he’d call a friendly Treasury minister; a few months later, the bill was magically written off. When the charity was in trouble, he accompanied its founder Camila Batmanghelidjh to the BBC radio studio – which will, as he knew, have sent its own message. Yentob’s behaviour is rare, however, and few BBC executives would dream of using their influence in this way.

The BBC’s dominance explains why Nicola Sturgeon is so keen for BBC Scotland to be spun off into something that her government could better manipulate. The Scottish nationalists have long been obsessed with broadcasting, seeing it as an opportunity to mould voters’ world view so they see themselves as Scottish, rather than British. They dream of a Scottish Six O’Clock TV news programme, relegating goingson in Westminster to a “foreign affairs” slot. Worryingly, the BBC has been giving this seriously consideration – which raises questions over the very idea of British television news. It may be one of the more consequential outcomes of the Charter review.

And as for the other outcomes? For all of the histrionics, there will be very few of them. A dollop of belttightening here, a bit of housekeeping there. But the hardest questions that the BBC needs to address will be left for another time.