Finking out your colleagues takes guts. So who is the Bernie Goldberg of the BBC? Bernie, in case you don’t know, was a CBS News reporter who filed from the personal finance frontline. He found it convenient to take CBS’s money while all the time accumulating evidence of its liberal lies (this labour of love took some thirty years – he was still hard at it when I was there). Still, at least people in the US had vaguely heard of Bernie…

Now step forward the hitherto anonymous Robin Aitken, who wants to expose liberal bias at the BBC. This prisoner of conscience was pressed into service by the corporation back in 1978, and finally quit in disgust took voluntary redundancy in 2005 – thanks to licence-fee-payers’ generosity. Instead of answering the question, how long does it take to grow a backbone? Aitken gets his violin out in the Mail, in a whinge-alog so pathetic that, like the death of Little Nell, you’d need a heart of stone not to laugh.

There are plenty of problems with the BBC. But they are serious problems to do with (strangely enough) the conservative nature of its public function and its financing, which undermines private – and more diverse – provision. In the meantime, there’s Robin Aitken.