RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Nick Robinson is deluded if he thinks this was a Right-wing coup. The BBC turned its again on the values of correct folks years in the past…

Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t always mean everyone’s out to get you. Today programme presenter Nick Robinson’s extraordinary, semi-deranged on-air rant about a Right-wing plot to bring down the BBC was a classic example of the self-obsessed, self-deluding bunker mentality which pervades the corridors of New Broadcasting House.

Despite Panorama being exposed for deliberately distorting the truth about Donald Trump allegedly inciting violence before the Capitol Hill riots, the default position of far too many BBC lifers has been to circle the waggons and attempt to occupy the moral high ground.

Yesterday, Robinson tried to spin this corrupt outrage as a conspiracy against the Beeb involving a former board member who once worked for Theresa May.

Oh, do grow up, son. You’re better than that. Or at least, you should be. Yet the fact that Robinson, a former stalwart of the Conservative Party’s youth wing, has guzzled the BBC’s Left-wing Kool-Aid is a graphic illustration of just how far our publicly funded broadcaster has disappeared down a Guardianista rabbit hole.

With depressing, but entirely predictable, inevitability the intergalactically pompous Beeb veteran John Simpson weighed in behind Robinson, going into full Kenneth Williams in Carry On Cleo mode.

Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me.

We’re talking Hillary Clinton’s ‘vast Right-wing conspiracy’ here. Steady on, chaps. All you need to know about Simpson is that the last time anyone looked he was described as ‘World Editor’.

What do you do, John?

I edit the World . . .

Of course you do, guv.

There, in a nutshell, is the self-importance of our arrogant, Auntie-Knows-Best state broadcaster. No doubt Nick Robinson still believes his Radio 4 breakfast show sets the agenda for the nation, just as Simpson obviously thinks the world is his lobster.

Have I Got News For You, to borrow the title of a once-unmissable BBC show which has morphed into a yet another boring Left-wing virtue-fest, but the game’s up, Nick.

As a barometer of genuine mainstream British opinion, the Today prog has long since been overtaken by LBC’s Nick Ferrari. I haven’t listened to Radio 4 in the morning since John Humphrys hung up his headphones.

Just for the record, I’m not writing any of this out of an ingrained animus towards the BBC or because I write for the Daily Mail – even though this newspaper passes as a lazy punchline for every jobbing, unfunny ‘comedian’ on every Beeb panel show these days – along with Trump, Farage, Brexit, blah, blah, blah.

They’re still flogging Mrs Thatcher jokes on Radio 4. She’s been dead for donkey’s years and was deposed as Prime Minister 35 years ago. But at the BBC comedy department, the needle returns to the start of the song and they all sing along like it’s still 1990. Even Ben Elton gave up the ‘Thatch’ jokes in the Nineties.

We are, however, entitled to expect better from News and Current Affairs. And that was where Panorama failed us miserably, splicing the Trump speech together to give an entirely false, indeed diametrically opposite, impression.

It was about as accurate as Richard Dimbleby’s famous Spaghetti Harvest spoof on Panorama in 1957. But that was meant to be an April Fool’s joke, not responsible journalism.

After a six-month cover-up, the corporation has finally fessed up and two suits at the top have resigned – Tim Davie, the director general, and Deborah Turness, head of News and Current Affairs.

Both fell on their swords, although Turness’s resignation was less than gracious, it has to be said. She expressed ‘regret’ but not proper contrition, still claiming that the BBC was the ‘world’s most trusted news source’. Which, obviously, it isn’t any more – even if it ever was.

Then again, I was astonished to read that Debs was responsible for 6,000 staff. Six thousand? What do they all do?

Davie’s position was untenable – he’s where the buck stops. And he’s got previous, most notably over the Glastonbury ‘Death to the IDF’ nonsense and the rampant anti-Semitism peddled on his watch.

And, frankly, I’d have sacked him for wearing trainers with a blue suit. He’s the DG of the BBC, for heaven’s sake. You can’t exactly imagine Lord Reith wearing a pair of white plimsolls with a double-breasted Jacob Rees-Mogg Savile Row whistle.

But here’s the problem. The institutionalised bias is ingrained. They don’t even know they’re doing it.

I can remember doing a gig at a Question Time-style evening at a North London synagogue to celebrate the anniversary of the birth of the nation of Israel.

I was asked if the BBC was biased against Israel. My answer was: yes, but they don’t realise it. They never meet anyone who thinks differently from them. Their anti-Israel bias is as natural as breathing.

Another guest that night was the BBC’s Middle Eastern hack Jeremy Bowen, who’d turned up late pleading how important he was. He walked out after my remarks, refusing to shake my hand, presumably heading off to take dictation from Hamas.

Here’s another ‘for instance’. On Sunday, I switched over from Sky’s Trevor Phillips show – the best weekend current affairs programme on TV these days by a country mile – to watch the BBC’s Remembrance coverage.

The Beeb is still where the nation goes for great national occasions, royal weddings, funerals, etc, the Mail’s Robert Hardman and all that.

Except, BBC1 was still broadcasting Laura Wossname. She was interviewing the Breaking Bad actor Bryan Cranston, soon to star in an Arthur Miller play in London’s West End.

I’m up for a bit of that, I thought. Loved Breaking Bad. Then she asked him: was his President a sociopath? What the hell has that got to do with Arthur Miller – especially in a week where the Beeb has just been found manufacturing lies about Trump? Cranston evaded the question with some style.

Still, par for the course these days at the biased BBC.

As I said, none of this is motivated by personal animosity. I have great residual affection for the Beeb, just like – I imagine – most of you reading this.

We grew up with Auntie, Biddy Baxter, Listen With Mother, The Woodentops, Blue Peter, Doctor Who, Dixon Of Dock Green, The Gen Game, Match Of The Day in black and white, Some People Are On the Pitch, etc. Every generation has its own memories.

I’ve been lucky enough to work for the Beeb, on and off, presenting the flagship football phone-in 6-0-6 for five years, doing the odd turn for Radio 2. Everyone I’ve worked with has been brilliantly professional.

Back in the dim and distant, I was wheeled in to see the controller of Radio 2, Jim Moir, who asked me to sit in for the late, great Jimmy Young when he was on holiday.

Why me? I asked, when you’ve got so many fabulous natural broadcasters to choose from?

Your readers, Jim said, are my listeners.

Sadly, not so much any more. The BBC doesn’t want Daily Mail readers these days. We’ve all followed Ken Bruce to Greatest Hits Radio.

Jeremy Vine, to his credit, keeps the aspidistra flying, but shorn of Ken, the late Terry Wogan and dear old Steve Wright, Don Black, Gloria Hunniford, and so on and so on and scooby dooby dooby, Radio 2 is no longer the natural home of Daily Mail central.

Radio 4, Radio 5 to a lesser extent, and the News and Current Affairs division, are Guardian country. The 6,000 who used to work for Debbie Turness were probably all hired out of that newspaper’s media pages and doubtless share the same Left-wing Islingtonian, anti-Brexit, anti-Reform, anti-Israel, anti-America, you name it, they’re agin it, world view. Which is how you end up with the Trump/Panorama abomination.

So where do we go from here? In my humble opinion, there’s only one man who can turn the BBC round – and that’s my old boss at Radio 5, Roger Mosey.

He’s been head of BBC TV, editor of Today, head of sport, brought us the successful Olympics coverage, loves the BBC, loves Britain and is impeccably impartial (whatever his personal politics). Plus, he’s available.

And when I worked for Roger, he had a brilliant young political reporter/presenter. Name of Nick Robinson, from what I remember.