There’s something grimly comic about watching Tim Davie, arguably the most openly conservative Director-General the BBC has had in living memory, get taken down by the very people he’s spent five years trying to placate.

Davie was the Tory pick who wanted more right-wing comedians, and who called for balance after years of bad-faith complaints about ‘BBC bias’.

He is the man who seems to have believed that if he just gave Nigel Farage a warm enough seat and the right-wing press a sympathetic ear, they’d stop kicking the Beeb.

They didn’t. They just kicked harder.

Because here’s the truth the BBC refuses to face: You can’t appease people who don’t want you to exist.

Farage and his ilk, shouting from the bully pulpit of parts of the right-wing press, don’t want a ‘fair BBC’. They want a

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