Matthew Norman: The strange, lingering suicide of the BBC

Sitting in a High Court conference room one cold January day in 2004, little did we foresee the implications for Britain's last well-loved national institution of what we were hearing. Of course we didn't. We were too busy fighting to suppress the laughter to find the energy for clairvoyance.

For me, ever the professional, it proved a losing battle. Lord Hutton had weakened resistance by repeatedly pronouncing the word mass, as in WMD, to rhyme with arse, indeed farce. When he then revealed that the furthest he could go, in judging whether Alastair Campbell pressured John Scarlett to spice up the intelligence, was that just maybe, Scarlett had sensed some unspoken desire of Campbell's that the reports be less equivocal and subliminally reacted to it, that was it. The giggling erupted, and I scurried from the room before His Lordship had me removed. This high point of judicial buffoonery soon lost its comic edge.

Within a day, a flawlessly executed establishment fix had removed chairman Gavyn Davies and director general Greg Dyke, and set the template for the cowardice under fire we now see from the BBC almost daily. Today, thanks to a monumentally clueless retired Law Lord, we look on helplessly as the BBC commits a lingering form of professional suicide.

It was snowing in the Strand that January day, and from memory I'm pretty sure that was the last time any snow settled in London. It should go without saying that one can draw no conclusion about climate change from the meteorological observation that that snowfall in one part of one country has all but vanished, where 30 years ago it was plentiful. It should do, but it doesn't.

The central reason for the BBC's abandonment of its climate change telethon Planet Relief is that those who dismiss global warming as a leftie conspiracy to purloin more taxes do not play by the same rules. To them, much as for Messrs Scarlett and Campbell, anything may be adduced as decisive proof.

Almost every paper has its resident climate change gainsayer ... a hack with at most a chemistry O-level who, through some mystical process of scholarly osmosis, has come to understand this complex subject better than all those hundreds of scientists, armed with powerful computer simulations, who have devoted their working lives to it. There are countless examples of their work, but one will suffice to give a flavour. A while ago, the Daily Mail's Tom Utley assuaged worries about water levels rising as a result of melting glaciers on this single ground: when the ice in his gin and tonic melts, explained Mr Utley (and one presumes this won him a fellowship of the Royal Society), the liquid doesn't come spilling over the top of his glass.

There are at least a dozen equally gifted amateurs in the national press, along with a small but vocal band of politicians and even the odd scientist, whose views dissent sharply from the mainstream. Somehow this elite corps has created a weather system of its own to freeze the well-meaning but enfeebled heart of the BBC.

I yield to no one in my disdain for TV marathons in which soap actors and comics brandish their empathy like AK47s, spraying bullets of misplaced moral superiority at the viewer. But I also accept that the likes of Bob Geldof and Richard Curtis are heroes for the barely calculable good they do in raising not merely money but awareness of the gravest global problems.

It isn't easy to picture Lord Reith sitting in his armchair revelling in the sight of Davina McCall prancing across a stage in a £16,000 designer outfit hectoring the viewership to cough up for the starving of Somalia. But if there is a more effective modern translation of his mission statement about the need to "inform, educate and entertain" than a climate change telethon, I can't imagine what it might be.

There is plenty of room too, of course, for more rigorous scientific documentaries for those who prefer them, and such a series will apparently replace Planet Relief. But when it comes to engaging a young audience with the perceived attention span of a goldfish in early stage Alzheimer's, what you need is Ricky Gervais reprising his well-worn parody of the faux-altruistic celeb.

Trailing this latest act of BBC cravenness at the Edinburgh TV Festival, Newsnight editor Peter Barron declared that it isn't the Beeb's job to save the world. This brings to mind a politician whom few of you will remember. Long ago, it was the rhetorical gambit of a Mr Tony Blair to address only those arguments that had never been made.

No one to my knowledge has ever said that the BBC exists to save the world, or that this was Planet Relief's intent. To conflate the desire to inform and educate about what may or may not be a danger to humanity with a megalomaniacal Messiah complex is the cheapest form of intellectual chicanery. If Mr Barron cannot trust his employer to include, in an entire day of programming, sufficient caveats about the reliability of scientific opinion, he might think about working for a less irresponsible broadcaster.

The truth is that this climbdown has nothing to do with the desire to avoid preachiness or partiality; and everything to do with the blind fear of being attacked that is the residue of Hutton and those recent, foolish but trivial misjudgments over that Queen documentary and those "live" TV phone in competitions.

Thirty years ago, when the snow fell freely over London, our elders and betters routinely referred to British institutions with stereotypical English smugness. The Royal Family, the NHS, the police, the judicial system, Lloyds of London and the BBC ... each and every one was, to the ever nostalgic inhabitants of a fading post-imperial power, "the best in the world".

Of the above, only the BBC deserved that reputation then, and only the BBC retains it now. Quite suddenly it is in jeopardy, however, not because there is another broadcaster on this planet fit to lick the boots of a corporation which, for all its foibles and errors, remains peerlessly trustworthy in the facet of public service broadcasting that matters most – the reporting and interpretation of fact. The BBC's reputation is imperilled because those who run it, still paralysed by post-Hutton traumatic stress, lack the balls to eschew grovelling for every trivial cock-up in favour of telling its critics that they won't take lectures on ethics and bias from tabloid newspapers and disgraced government propagandists.

The one memorable thing widely known about Mark Thompson, Mr Dyke's successor as director general, is that one day in 1988, for reasons that remain opaque, he bit a newsroom colleague on the arm. How the Beeb needs him to relocate his incisors and that latent attack dog instinct now.

More from Matthew Norman