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Patrick Barwise and Peter York must be miffed that the phantom controversy in August over patriotic songs at the Last Night of the Proms came too late to feature in their new book. Here was a classic souffl of an outrage, whipped up from the flimsiest ingredients, which enabled newspapers and ministers to wave the flag in the face of the BBCs incoming director-general Tim Davie for several days. Meanwhile the government floated Charles Moore, a man with no broadcasting experience who once appeared in court for not paying the licence fee, to be the next chair of the BBC. After Moore bowed out, attention turned to Sir Robbie Gibb, who went straight from heading BBC Westminster to working for Theresa May and is currently raising funds for the new right-leaning channel GB News. Other candidates are in play, but Rule, Britannia!, if nothing else, will be safe in the next chairs hands.

The BBC, Barwise and York claim in this staunch defence of the corporation, is the whole British nation in all its untidy variety and, at the same time, one of its glories. This books value lies in its steady accumulation of myth-busting data. In 2015, 99% of households used at least one BBC service at least once every week. It remains by far the most trusted source of impartial news. Nineteen out of the 25 most-watched programmes of the last decade were broadcast on BBC One. The BBC is still, to quote the old Radio 1 slogan, the nations favourite.

The rise of streaming, funding cuts and a 'hostile prime minister' make the BBC's current predicament particularly grave

At the same time, it is a punchbag of limitless utility, so large that even the clumsiest blow will land. Even 50 years ago, director-general Hugh Greene called it the universal Aunt Sally of our day. Barwise and York argue that a cluster of factors, including the rise of streaming, funding cuts and the most hostile prime minister the BBC has ever faced make its current predicament particularly grave, even now that Dominic Cummings is no longer a fixture at No 10: Most people would now agree that the Corporation is in real, perhaps existential, peril. The usually cautious Andrew Marr recently warned of a drive to destroy the BBC.

The war is fought on two fronts. The commercial argument is that the corporation is simply too big: funded by the licence fee, it overpay stars and bureaucrats in order to hog ground that the free market could cover. But this is a catch-22. If the BBC continues to produce critical and commercial hits, then it is unfair to competitors; if it does not, then it doesnt deserve the current licence fee (which has risen by just 12 since 2010). To cave in would be ruinous. The less the BBC did, the less money it would deserve, the less it could do, and so on until it became a shell of itself.

Running parallel to this is the political critique that the BBC is unacceptably leftwing. Not economically you could not claim that it is anti-business or pro-union but in the nebulous cultural sense. It is the mothership of snooty, decadent, avocado-eating liberal elites (as opposed to the benign conservative elite represented by Lord Moore of Etchingham). Gutting one of the UKs most beloved and unifying institutions, and a major generator of soft power, is therefore the patriotic thing to do.

Once you are committed to seeing the BBC as an alienatingly woke monoculture, you are prone to looking foolish. In 2018, the Spectators James Delingpole derided the BBC One drama Bodyguard as Social Justice Warrior propaganda for casting people who arent white men in positions of authority, even as, the authors note, Britain had a female prime minister, and a Muslim home secretary and mayor of London. My prediction is that the BBC is going to become increasingly marginal, partisan and irrelevant, fumed Delingpole, as Bodyguard proceeded to become the biggest hit of the year apart from the World Cup.

It's hard trying to bring down the BBC when the masses trust its output the wheels of grievance require constant oiling

It is hard work trying to bring down the BBC when the masses stubbornly insist on enjoying and trusting its output, so the wheels of grievance require constant oiling by newspapers, thinktanks and opaquely funded pressure groups such as News-watch. Governments have been growling at the BBC for decades. Winston Churchill never forgave it for remaining independent during the 1926 general strike, while Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair have all forced the departure of troublesome directors-general. The current assault is in line with US-style backlash politics, neatly summarised by a series of 2004 blogposts published by Cummingss short-lived thinktank the New Frontiers Foundation. The author argued that the right should aspire to end the BBC in its current form while enabling more partisan outlets in the vein of Fox News. One post described the BBC as a mortal enemy of the Conservative party, which can only prosper in the long-term by undermining the BBCs reputation for impartiality.

The effort has already paid off. In polls, accusations of bias, whether left/right or leave/remain, roughly balance out, but Barwise and York call this a symmetrical illusion. While comedy and drama may skew to the left (as the arts tend to do), the BBCs political coverage consistently favours the government of the day, with a more pronounced bias when that government is Conservative. Taking its cues (and many of its guests) from the conservative-dominated print media, it overrepresents the right - shows such as Question Time, Politics Live and, most egregiously, The Papers. Spooked by accusations of metropolitan leftism, the BBC is desperate to appease those who hate it.

The Tories treatment of the BBC is reminiscent of the movie hoodlum who says you have a nice place here and it would be a shame if anything were to happen to it. The aim is to instil fear. The BBC has belatedly abandoned false balance when covering the climate crisis but it is still nervous about calling a lie a lie, or wading into any story that might inflame the right. Thats how it has ended up with absurdly strict new prohibitions on staff expressing personal opinions on social media. The left cannot inspire the same anxiety. It may mount Twitter sorties against Laura Kuenssberg or Panorama but it wants to reform the BBC rather than diminish it, perhaps realising that it would fare poorly in a post-BBC media landscape.

No serious defence of the BBC can be uncritical. Barwise and York dutifully address its 21st-century blunders, from the prank-call Sachsgate affair in 2008 to major institutional failures such as the gender pay gap and the Jimmy Savile scandal, and recommend finding a viable alternative to the licence fee. They call out the BBCs timidity in the face of power, its rather odd current reading of the political continuum [and] its tendency to nannyism. Every reader (including this one) can mentally add their own complaints.

Still, the rights attacks on the BBC are not a sincere and proportionate response to actual mistakes, such as, most recently, the alleged historical misconduct of Martin Bashir. Its campaign is deliberately unwinnable because, like most culture wars, it relies on granting righteous victimhood to the powerful. There will always be a fresh affront to the delicate sensibilities of Middle England, or at least enough raw material to manufacture one. The right would be lost without its perpetual indignation machine.

Yet it can still inflict immense damage. If you want to see a news broadcasting ecosystem that conforms to the Tory blueprint, look across the Atlantic, where the barely regulated free market has enabled partisanship, distrust, disinformation and conspiracism to erode the shared reality on which a healthy democracy depends. This books urgent conclusion establishes just how much Britain stands to lose if the BBC as we know it falls.

The War Against the BBC: How an Unprecedented Combination of Hostile Forces Is Destroying Britains Greatest Cultural Institution ... And Why You Should Care is published by Penguin (10.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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The War Against the BBC review in defence of a national institution - The Guardian