 Earlier this month an interview between Nick Robinson and Boris Johnson got heated when in response to the Prime Minister's rambling and evasive answers, the today host told him to stop talking. There's no supply of young people in this country who frankly, at the moment, are thinking of becoming truck drivers. That is going to change and that's going to be a good thing. Stop talking. We are going to have questions and answers, not where you merely talk if you wouldn't mind. Now the question I now want to ask you is about it has long been Boris Johnson's strategy to avoid scrutiny by changing the subject or coming down with a sudden bout of verbal diarrhea. So I thought that was an effective technique by Nick Robinson to get him to answer the actual question. Not everyone was pleased though and that includes the new culture secretary Nadine Doris. She is overseeing negotiations over the future of the license fees. That's how the BBC gets its money. And according to the Sunday Times she has told allies that quote, Nick Robinson has cost the BBC a lot of money. A BBC insider has hit back telling the Times the following. This is a new secretary of state who perhaps hasn't realized that the constitutional independence of the BBC means that even at a time, in fact especially at a time when the license fee is being negotiated, it is not the job of party politicians to act like a judge on strictly giving marks for the quality of interviews. Ash, it's pretty worrying isn't it? We've got a culture secretary now that's threatening to cut funding to the BBC because of a tough interview. A tough interview for her prime minister. So I think what this speaks to is the institutional weakness of the BBC. It is hamstrung and being able to defend itself adequately. Because of that vulnerability around the negotiation of the license fee, the political power that governments of the day have in doing things like scrapping a free TV license for pensioners and also when it comes to charter renewal, you've seen marketization creep in as the BBC has a weaker negotiating position with each ongoing charter renewal. So that's why I think if you want to see a BBC which is able to stand up for itself, hold politicians feet to the fire and be truly constitutionally independent, you would have to establish it on a permanent statutory footing. And that is simply not something that's going to happen because each government of the day rather likes having a hobbled BBC which you can threaten and throw your weight around when they ask too many difficult questions. But within the BBC itself, I think that there is also a culture problem. There is a culture of deference of playing by the Westminster rules when it comes to interviewing politicians. So even when you do have a moment like Nick Robinson, I think still being perfectly courteous and polite, but being assertive and cutting through the bluster of Boris Johnson so that he, the interviewer can do his job properly, you don't have a tremendous amount of support coming from within the BBC itself. And I'll give you an example of this. Just on Sunday, yesterday morning, I was on Radio 4 Broadcasting House, and it was me, Tim Walker, Jeffrey Archer, and the host was Justin Rowlett. And this conversation came up. And every single person in this discussion in one way or another said, I think Nick Robinson went too far in saying Prime Minister, stop talking. What he should have done is, you know, very decorously, you know, try to say, now, if he wouldn't mind possibly waiting a moment, blah, blah, blah. And for me, what this revealed is a fundamental lack of understanding of what's going on with political communications at the moment. Boris Johnson really does follow in the tradition of somebody like Silvio Berlusconi or indeed some aspects of Donald Trump, where the job is not to communicate clearly to the public things that the public need to hear. It's about creating so much noise, just being essentially a white noise machine, able to befuddle and confuse the audience. You don't really know what you're listening to, muddy the waters, and that's how you get through the interview. So it's not really about serving the public's needs. It's about evading those needs in such a way, which means that you don't also drop a climb up. Now, when you're faced with a politician who has that as part of their core communication strategy, I think the only way, as an interviewer, you can get a grip on the thing is to be incredibly assertive. It is to say, Prime Minister, stop talking, I need to ask you a question, even have a little water pistol, you know, buy a son, give him a little square in the face if he's rambling on too long. Because otherwise, you're not going to be able to do your job. And by playing by these kind of old, very hands off, very kid loves rule, you're not ultimately going to be able to do your job, which is hold politicians to the two account in a public forum. I think this is basically the government throwing its weight around. We know the BBC is likely to be appointing a new political editor soon as Laura Koonsburg stands down. And of course, the whole point of that story in the Sunday Times is that the license fee is now being negotiated, which is literally where the BBC gets its money from. So this is dangling a Damoclesian sword over the public broadcaster to try and get them into line so that they... I mean, we often talk about BBC buyers, right? They're incredibly biased against Jeremy Corbyn because he wasn't an establishment politician. The Conservatives still don't think it is obsequious enough.