The debate about BBC funding is a staple in media pages, throwing up an approximate divide between the political poles – the right deploring the waste of money and leftist tendencies of the organisation; the left committed the doctrine of supporting a publicly sponsored propagator of information/entertainment untainted by the commercial influence of advertisers.

Nobody’s suggesting – at least not very loudly – that the BBC should cease to be funded at all, but the Tories have signalled their intention to freeze the Licence fee.

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We are waiting with eager curiosity to see the strength of Mazher Mahmood’s resolve to keep his identity secret. The News of the World has previously sought and been granted injunctions against the publishing of photographs showing his likeness, notably against the Guardian, after George Galloway rumbled him in February 2006. In the new paperback edition of News of the world? Fake Sheikhs & Royal Trappings, we have published a clear, unequivocal shot of Mahmood in his bogus middle eastern garb when he came to sting Princess Michael of Kent. He is standing with his friend, travel agent Aseem Kazi, who posed as Pervaiz Khan, potential buyer of Prince Michael’s house, Nether Lypiatt. Behind them is the pilot of the helicopter, hired by News International to bring them there, and to enhance the deception.

As a thoroughly discredited journalist on a morally bust newspaper, it seems unlikely that he would have any case to put to a judge to preserve his anonymity. He has wasted millions of pounds in police time, court time, and prison service costs by causing innocent men to be held on remand for months at a time, following some of his highly fanciful investigative stings. He is a menace to the public and, as demonstrated by his story in last Sunday’s Screws, pointing up security weaknesses at Buckingham Palace (for any potential terrorist to see), a serious danger to national security.

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As Murdoch talks of charging for online access to his British papers, the BBC’s Licence Fee could still annihilate the British Press.

The BBC is paid by the British public to provide public broadcasting services. In principle, despite the currently somewhat muted champions of market forces, most of us still support the concept.

BBC Radio provides a service that is unique in world communications.

BBC TV has for a long time fought the urge to submit entirely to raw populism, and although its grip on that resolve sometimes seems to falter, it still strives, and generally succeeds in delivering a broad and reflective range of programmes and is used by a large proportion of the public who pay for it.

However, it has also inevitably become a major presence among those organisations competing in the dissemination of information through the internet, where its public funding gives it a huge and inherently unfair advantage.

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The hysteria level in Grub Street over the wickedness of MPs is mounting by the day. You have to ask yourself if there isn’t just a hint of Schadenfreude in the editorial mix. It was pointed out only a couple of weeks ago by a witness giving evidence to the CMS Inquiry into Press Standards that MPs were second only to journalists in the depth of contempt in which they are held by the public.  Now the hacks (not unfamiliar with expense chitties themselves) are doing all they can to consolidate the reversal of those placings.

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It’s obvious, is it not, that if you were to produce a trough, fill it with money and place it in front of a 650 average English persons, it would be inevitable that snouts will be immersed in it, trotters, too sometimes, up to the hocks. The extent of abuse will vary from Western Saddleback to Gloucester Old Spot, but the more elastic the criteria by which the trough is kept topped up, the less incentive for individual restraint.

The way the Westminster trough has grown, and the reasons for it are symptoms of a classic British fudge.

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