SARAH VINE: Unless the BBC places its home so as, future generations won’t ever know the way it feels to have a trusted broadcaster on the coronary heart of our nationwide life

Serious as this situation at the BBC is, there is also an unmistakable element of farce to it. If you’ve ever watched the brilliant W1A, starring Hugh Bonneville as the BBC’s beleaguered ‘Head of Values’ Ian Fletcher, you will know exactly what I mean.

I keep expecting him to pop up on the Today Programme, being interviewed by Emma Barnett in her very best serious-important-news voice, explaining to the listeners why (season 1, episode 4): ‘If ever there was an opportunity for the BBC to stand tall and make a big, bold statement about how much it values the idea of valuing values, then surely this is it.’

Ah yes, very good, very strong, as Simon Harwood (Director of Strategic Governance, played by the stupendously sinister Jason Watkins) might have said.

Come to think of it, maybe they should think about asking him. God knows we could all use a bit of light relief.

Written by John Morton (a classic example of the kind of outstanding home-grown talent that the BBC has historically nurtured) W1A, which ran for three seasons from 2014, was all about the internal tangles of bureaucracy, personal enmity, buck-passing and general corporate incompetence that have led to precisely the kind of mess the real organisation currently finds itself in.

But perhaps even Morton would have struggled to dream up such a mad scenario as the one facing Auntie today. Being sued by the President of the United States might have been dismissed as far too farcical a plotline – and yet here we are. Not even hapless intern Will Humphries (Hugh Skinner) would have got himself in such a terrible pickle.

And all because of what? The mistakes of a small, smug, self-selecting group of BBC apparatchiks too stupid to realise you can’t just shape the news to suit your own agenda and get away with it.

That if you are funded by public money, you have an extra duty of care towards the facts and can’t just pick and choose to furnish your narrative.

It’s absolutely maddening – not just because it’s obviously wrong, but also because it undermines everything else the BBC does. And that’s not fair on all the brilliant, highly committed talent that still exists at the corporation, or on the millions of viewers – myself included – who love all the other great stuff it does, from Antiques Roadshow to The Archers.

The sad truth is the BBC, like so many of our public institutions, has been captured by a cabal of rather mediocre but cunning individuals whose only real talent is self-promotion – and whose actions threaten to bring the whole edifice crashing down. They seem to have no understanding of what the BBC is, who it’s for or what it stands for.

They see it merely as a vehicle for career advancement – and, of course, impressing their woke friends at trendy media dinner parties.

More than that, they lack the vision and moral compass that are essential to anyone presuming to run the BBC. It’s as though they can’t even understand what they’ve done wrong.

Take Jonathan Munro, deputy to Deborah Turness, the head of news who resigned on Monday. He is quoted as saying in the leaked Prescott report that kicked off this particular scandal that: ‘There was no attempt to mislead the audience about the content or nature of Mr Trump’s speech before the riot at the Capitol. It’s normal practice to edit speeches into short form clips.’

‘Normal practice’. In other words, nothing to see here. Tell that to Mr Trump’s lawyers. This man was also, as it happens, one of the people who approved the disastrous Cliff Richard police raid fiasco back in 2014, which went on to cost the BBC £2 million.

As such, one might argue that he’s very much part of the problem, not the solution.

And yet, guess who is now vying to take over from Ms Turness at the corporation? You guessed it: Mr Munro.

But it’s not just the doctoring of Trump’s speech in Panorama. That, really, is just the proverbial straw that’s broken the camel’s back. This all goes back a long way – to 1995, in fact – with Martin Bashir’s scandalous dishonesty surrounding his interview with Princess Diana.

It is now well established that Bashir falsified documents seeking to persuade her brother, Charles Spencer, to believe that there was an establishment plot against her and that her private secretary Patrick Jephson and others were being paid to spy on her. A puzzled Spencer then introduced Bashir to his sister Diana, who became even more paranoid and distressed

After that Panorama programme was broadcast, the man who created the false documents – who was appalled – reported this to executives up the BBC chain, who in time escalated it to the then head of news, one Tony Hall.

He issued a statement saying the graphics – ie forgeries – ‘were never connected in any way to the Panorama on Princess Diana’. Perhaps he did not know of the fake documents at that moment, but he certainly did when he later fed a similar line to the Board of Governors, knowing that Bashir had showed them to Spencer.

John Birt, director-general at the time, claimed he knew nothing about Bashir’s lies – despite the fact he had a close relationship with Hall and had messaged him before the board meeting reminding him that they ‘needed to be clear about the matters we have been discussing’.

Both men are now, of course, sitting pretty in the House of Lords. But had the BBC top brass come clean at the time about the forgeries, Princess Diana might not have abandoned her own security for Mohamed Al Fayed’s – and might arguably be alive today.

It is perhaps worth mentioning, as a coda, that the man later instrumental in the reappointment of Bashir in 2016 after his disgrace was… Jonathan Munro.

It’s hard not to conclude that there is something if not exactly rotten then distinctly fishy at the heart of all this.

These men are weak, they are cowardly. And it is because of their incompetence that one of our greatest national institutions, which has given us countless hours of brilliant drama, documentary, comedy, radio, theatre, analysis, which has shaped our cultural landscape over the past 100 years, which was once the envy of the world, now faces destruction. It is an absolute tragedy.

But then isn’t that the truth about so many of the things that once made us proud to be British?

The NHS, founded on the noblest of principles, now a sprawling, incompetent, exorbitant mess. Our welfare system, there to help the neediest in society, abused by wily, unscrupulous opportunists.

Our police forces, paralysed by wokeness, obsessed with pursuing virtual crimes while real-world felons get off scot-free.

Our Armed Forces, stripped to the bare bones, sidelined and demoralised, saddled with sub-standard equipment and hounded through the courts by rapacious and frankly treasonous human rights lawyers.

Our universities, once a global benchmark and an engine of social mobility, now a tedious, undisciplined rabble of woke ideology. Our once-great monarchy, traduced and tarnished by its own members.

For me, growing up in Italy, the BBC was one of the things I missed the most about Britain.

The professionalism, the impeccable standards, the sheer quality and variety of the shows on TV and radio – if you’ve never been without it, you don’t know how uniquely brilliant and special all that is.

Unless the BBC puts its house in order once and for all, all that will be lost, and future generations will grow up not knowing how it feels to have a trusted broadcaster at the heart of public life.

Britain will have lost another one of its great institutions and with it another important – and irreplaceable – piece of this country’s cultural landscape.