ASTONISHINGLY, it is almost ten years since I first wrote my first blog for TCW. By that time, I had been friends with and worked with Kathy Gyngell for almost 30 years, 14 of them in trying to hold the BBC in check over its outrageously pro-EU coverage, through News-watch, an organisation we set up jointly in 1999.

The springboard to that blog a decade ago? The BBC’s incestuous, self-serving infatuation with Glastonbury. I noted that the Corporation was sending its usual hundreds-strong army to mount disproportionately lavish coverage of the event.

And why? I argued that in the BBC’s warped events diary, this was a ‘woke’ happening par excellence – because at its heart was support for a galaxy of right-on causes such as climate alarmism, led that year by Greenpeace.

My observations about the BBC – underpinned by News-watch research – soon became a feature of TCW’s regular Beebwatch column, and subjects in the first couple of years included the Corporation’s spiteful participation in the baseless claims against Cliff Richard, the build-up to the Brexit referendum, and then in its aftermath, persecution and denigration of Nigel Farage, and the concerted effort to undermine and reverse the ‘yes’ vote.