According to reports, the soon-to-be published green paper on the future of the BBC will include “an investigation into the impartiality of BBC News”. I am worried that such an investigation might conclude that the BBC, and its news output in particular, is indeed politically biased.

To begin with there’s the BBC current political editor, Nick Robinson, who is about to swap his five minutes on the evening bulletins for three hours on the Today programme. Aeons ago Robinson was chairman of the Young Conservatives, a fact that much exercised Alastair Campbell when he was Labour’s director of communications, although I have to say as a viewer (and former colleague) I have always found Robinson’s reporting to be both insightful and scrupulously fair.

So if Robinson is off the hook, how about the BBC journalist who gets the more political airtime than any other – Andrew Neil? He presents or co-presents five hours of television a week including This Week, the Daily Politics and Sunday Politics. Neil might be a penetrating interviewer exposing weaknesses in the arguments advanced by politicians of the left, right and centre but his past leans in one direction.

He is a former Rupert Murdoch editor, was a researcher for the Conservative party and is chairman of the Conservative-supporting Spectator magazine. He also stoutly argued his free market views at the Hayek lecture at the rightwing Institute of Economic Affairs in November 2005.

But the real worry for me lies behind the scenes where, many suggest, the real power lies. For it’s there we would have found Nick Robinson’s former senior producer, Thea Rogers, who left in 2012 to become special advisor to the chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne. Then there’s Robbie Gibb, the current excellent editor of all BBC TV’s political programmes In a former life he was a vice-chairman of the extreme rightwing Federation of Conservative Students and went on to become chief of staff to the senior Tory MP Francis Maude before joining the BBC.

And we, or the bias investigators, should not overlook the fact that David Cameron replaced his previous press secretary, Andy Coulson, with the then editor of BBC News, Craig Oliver and, around the same time, London mayor Boris Johnson recruited BBC political correspondent Guto Harri, to head his media team (and when Harri moved on to the Murdoch empire he was replaced by Will Walden, a BBC news editor at Westminster).

But in the context of Tory-aligned personnel in influential positions within the BBC, perhaps most importantly of all, one thinks of the recently retired chair of the BBC Trust, Lord Patten, a former Conservative cabinet minister.

Hands up those who can remember the last time a former Labour minister chaired the BBC – the correct answer, is never. Patten was, by my reckoning, the tenth BBC chair to sit in either the Commons or Lords on the Tory benches The equivalent Labour total is one – Phillip Inman – who was chairman of the governors in 1947, for less than a year.

There are of course others with Labour links who have been associated with the BBC. The last chairman with any Labour connections was Gavyn Davies who was unceremoniously sacked by a Labour government. A former Labour minister, James Purnell, is currently working as a senior BBC executive, specifically on charter renewal, and both Andrew Marr and ex-Newsnight economics editor Paul Mason had flirtations with Trotskyist groups in their youth.

The only other current or recent Labour connections I am aware of are political correspondent Lance Price, who left the corporation to become Labour’s director of communications, and one of his predecessors at the Labour party, Joy Johnson, who had been the BBC’s political news editor at Westminster and was told, after she ceased to work for the party, that she could not expect to return to the BBC (and she didn’t).

It’s also worth recalling that, unrelated to news coverage, when the writer Melvyn Bragg became a Labour peer, he was immediately banned from appearing on any programmes that might have any political content.

Nobody is arguing (at least I am not) that political journalists should be political eunuchs. If you are interested in politics, and one would have thought that that was a basic requirement of working in the area, one is going to have political views. Hence, the fact that some BBC journalists have, or had, left- or rightwing leanings should not be a cause of surprise or concern.

In fact, I would argue that if your own political opinions are “on the record” then it is that much easier for colleagues and, more importantly, the audience to judge whether you are allowing those opinions to influence your output.

Indeed, I worry about those political journalists I know who proudly state they have no political views. I worry because everyone has political views and, if you are not conscious of your own, then how are you going to take them into account when you are reflecting on the fairness, or otherwise, of your own reporting?

The current notion that there is obvious bias at the BBC – whether it be of the right or the left – that can be “investigated” and presumably purged, is troubling. The secretary of state has appointed a review panel to guide him through the choppy waters of charter renewal – let’s hope the panel are sensible enough to steer him away from this particular whirlpool.

Ivor Gaber is professor of journalism at the University of Sussex and a former political journalist for BBC TV and radio, ITN, Channel 4 and Sky News. This is an extract from a forthcoming book The BBC Today: Future Uncertain, edited by John Mair, Richard Tait and Richard Lance Keeble