It took one question for the ground to collapse beneath Nicky Morgan's feet

The culture secretary could hardly have made clearer why she refused to serve in the government in which she now serves

Nicky Morgan’s speech on the future of the BBC took place in a boring conference room almost directly above The Westminster Arms pub, where she may have been surprised to find herself suddenly recreating the national broadcaster’s most celebrated moment.

It only took one question from a journalist at the end for the ground to be yanked clean from under her, and she found herself crashing through the bar below like only Derek Trotter has ever done before.

For about half an hour, she had outlined the challenges facing the BBC, principally from streaming services like Netflix and YouTube; how young viewers weren’t interested, telling the BBC it had to “stay relevant”.

And then, at the end, up went the hand of a journalist from The Daily Telegraph, who wanted to know, given it was so important for the BBC to “stay relevant, a consistent theme in your speech”, why was the government boycotting Radio 4’s Today programme and its 7 million listeners, even in the wake of last weekend’s terror attack?

There is, of course, no acceptable answer to that question, so it should come as no surprise that the culture secretary failed to find one.

“Erm, all I would say is that everybody who has wanted to come here today is extremely welcome.” Oh right. That’ll do then. The government is telling the BBC to “stay relevant” while simultaneously stopping it from doing so but ah! Hang on a minute, there’s this speech happening in a room above a pub and anyone they like can come to that so it’s all fine.

Morgan continued: “There are decisions that are taken elsewhere that are about which programme, but individual programmes or channels, there is a massive amount of engagement between government ministers and the BBC and all other broadcasters.”

Make of that what you will. I’d love to go on the Today programme if I could but it’s not up to me guv. It’s the nasty man called Dominic and there’s nothing I can do.

Trouble is, these are the very reasons that Morgan publicly declared she was standing down as an MP, because she could not serve in a Boris Johnson government, and yet, here she is, back in the government she stood down from in protest, and because she is essentially a decent person, failing to defend the indefensible, making accidentally abundantly clear why she stood down in the first place.

Well, I say abundantly clear. Abundant is the wrong word. There was not a great deal of abundance about. It is sad to have to report that Nicky Morgan’s speech, on how the kidz don’t watch the BBC anymore because they’re all on YouTube, was not broadcast on the BBC, but on, you’ve guessed it, YouTube.

Over on the fusty, old, irrelevant BBC News channel, Victoria Derbyshire was interviewing Meghan off Love Island about the sexually explicit pre-roll ad for the clothing label she represents that has now been banned – and broadcasting it in full. What was the point? As Morgan was absolutely correct to point out, they’ve already haemorrhaged all their viewers to YouTube; which was why, over on YouTube, fully 54 people were watching Nicky Morgan give a speech on the “Future of Broadcasting”.

And what, by the way, was her solution to the BBC’s woes? Of how it must “stay relevant”, of how it must rise to the immense challenges posed by YouTube and Netflix?

That’s right: the decriminalisation of failure to pay the TV licence fee.

By way of background, tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of people are prosecuted each year for failure to pay the licence fee, or more accurately, failure to pay the fines for not paying. Dozens are jailed. Last year, The Guardian went to a magistrates’ court on what was essentially “failure to pay the licence fee day” and found a profoundly confused mass of extremely socially disadvantaged people, including one man who didn’t speak much English and who had turned up to court with his television, imagining that if he handed it over the problem would be solved.

One reaches for the analogies of solutions that don’t appear to exist in the same universe as the problem they are meant to solve, but it is slightly too far-fetched for anything to come to mind.

How will the BBC “stay relevant”? How will it stop the youngsters scampering off to YouTube to watch speeches by Nicky Morgan, quite literally in their tens? Ah, that’ll be it. We’ll decriminalise the non-payment of the licence fee.

When a relatively small number of profoundly confused poor people no longer find themselves on the wrong side of the criminal law, the youth of today will rise up as one, slam shut their laptops, say no! to the latest breathless Zoella make-up haul unboxing (and the sexually explicit pre-roll ad the irrelevant old BBC is investigating) and rush to their living rooms urgently to find out who’s through to the quarter finals of the World Snooker Championships live from The Crucible Threatre in Sheffield.

’Course they will.

The BBC’s Norman Smith had a question next. “Everyone at the BBC knows it needs to adapt to the streaming era. How does this decriminalisation assist the BBC in any way in meeting that challenge? Isn’t this just a punishment beating by a government... looking for a bit of political payback?”

Well, yes. Even Trigger could have told you that. Alas, by this point Nicky Del Boy Morgan had long since disappeared.