In the pink

"The most dreary thing in the whole world - and shoot me if I ever do it - is people who write to the newspapers to say things were better in my day."

The words of former BBC man Roger Mosey, saying farewell to Auntie in August this year. We don't have to shoot him yet, because he's written in The Times indicating things were actually worse in his day - a lumpen market-dominant BBC, strangled by size, the BBC Trust, and unchallenged liberal views. Slice away and make it better, he urges, from the metal-barred windows of the Master's Lodge at Selwyn College, Cambridge, built in 1883, when leeches were still part of medical armoury.

The BBC always expects size to be part of a Charter debate, but wouldn't have expected Roger to blow the starting whistle; after all, he presided over one of the biggest of big things the corporation has ever constructed, The 2012 Olympics, including The Bloomin' Torch. So there is some chuntering at HQ, with the words "a bit much" heard in the same sentence as "£2.8m pension pot" and "News International".

His article won the support of Newsnight's Mark Urban, who tweeted that he thought the BBC was "no longer dominated by the left. But its liberal values can be suffocating". Watch that man. Katz. There was also backing from Tim Montgomerie, former editor of Conservative Home, and now comment editor, yes, for The Times.

Some have said Roger did little to challenge this pinko consensus while still inside; he points his critics to this article from 2003, headlined "President Bush is not automatically wrong". Here's some more political thinking from Roger, in The Spectator in 2009.

• Here's Roger's Times piece in full, released from the paywall by the man himself.