HOW can the BBC avoid getting into this kind of mess again? What turned a drama into a crisis at our national broadcaster — it is now clear — was a paralysis of decision-making at the level of the BBC Board. As a result, the organisation dithered for a week over what kind of apology to issue for the clumsy editing of the speech made by President Trump after he lost the 2020 election. The stalemate eventually forced the resignation of the Director General, Tim Davie.

BBC managers had wanted a quick and limited apology. But members of the Board demanded a much greater mea culpa for what they perceived as a wider Left-leaning institutional bias among BBC News staff.

In the vanguard of this culture war was Sir Robbie Gibb, a former member of Downing Street staff appointed to the BBC Board by Boris Johnson. At the centre of the row was a long memo by a former political editor of The Sunday Times, Michael Prescott, who had been appointed as an external adviser by a small committee of which Sir Robbie was an influential member.

It all brought to a head the long war of attrition against the BBC by right-wing politicians and newspapers. Media magnates such as Rupert Murdoch have, for decades, seen the BBC as a threat to their television stations and newspapers. A smaller BBC would be less of a challenge to both their commercial interests and their right-wing values.

Cuts to the funding of the BBC also suited the austerity agenda of 14 years of Conservative government, which slashed the BBC budget by 30 per cent. This did not just cut programming: many experienced editors left. In their place are a new generation of reporters, some of whom think that their idea of the truth is more important than the old value of journalistic impartiality.

Mr Prescott’s 19-page memo contains some criticisms of BBC journalism, particularly of its uncritical embrace of trans ideology, which may resonate with a majority of viewers. But many of his complaints, as the BBC chairman, Samir Shah, points out, pale into insignificance against the extraordinarily consistent journalism of the BBC.

The Liberal Democrat leader, Sir Ed Davey, has called for Sir Robbie to be removed from the BBC Board, so that he cannot influence the selection of the next Director General. But something far more radical is required. Members of the BBC Board should not be political appointees, but should be appointed by a Select Committee or public body charged with ensuring that it represents the whole range of political opinions in the country, not just the current government.

The BBC needs to be more independent, not less. It needs to be given the budget to reintroduce training for a new generation of journalists in the nature of impartiality. It must exercise more effective scrutiny of the independent production companies to which much broadcasting is today outsourced. The BBC operates under a Charter, which was originally devised to ensure broadcasters’ independence. In recent decades, this has come to be used by politicians as a means to make the BBC more acquiescent to the government of the day. Sir Keir Starmer should charge ministers working on the 2027 Charter to address these fundamental issues.