Cancel culture and fear of causing offence has led to a crisis of confidence at the BBC, says D.J. Taylor

Back in the late 2000s I went to a New Year’s Eve party given by a couple who knew Mark Damazer, then controller of BBC Radio 4. Damazer, a courteous and affable man, went around the gathering asking people: what did they think of the station and what could be done to improve it? My advice was to sack John Humphrys, cancel The Moral Maze and decommission The Archers. Damazer, who took this at face value, gravely replied, alas, that he could do none of these things.

A decade and more later, Humphrys has skipped off into retirement but The Moral Maze and The Archers are still going strong. Meanwhile, criticism of Radio 4 is going stronger still. Some of the brickbats tossed in the direction of Mo Bakaya, the station’s current kingpin, are simply malicious: one discounts practically every story about the BBC that appears in a Murdoch newspaper merely because they can be traced back to the quivering hand of their proprietor.