This must be a difficult time for Jeremy Hunt, the "minister of fun". That phrase was coined, I should explain for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the chaotic days of the Major administration, by the first of Hunt's predecessors, David Mellor, who in his short tenure, revealed himself to be a big fan of fun. His cabinet career unravelled under a barrage of allegations (do things unravel under barrages? I suppose we'll have to wait until the rioters target an Edinburgh Woollen Mill) that he'd taken free holidays and had had sex. Sex that his wife knew nothing about. Perhaps she was a deep sleeper.

Illustration by David Foldvari

Back then, the official job title was "secretary of state for national heritage", which suggests a much less onerous range of duties than "culture, Olympics, media and sport": combating attempts to tamper with the Radio 4 schedule, listening politely to the Greek ambassador's weekly complaint about the Elgin Marbles, deciding whether the National Trust should be allowed to buy the 61% of the south-west coastal path that it doesn't already own, that sort of thing.

Jeremy Hunt was given the brief at an altogether more sombre time and he hasn't troubled to lighten the mood with mental images of him wearing a football shirt while having his toes sucked by a desperate actress. Instead, he adds to the misery: closing the Film Council, eviscerating the Arts Council, humbling the BBC. He didn't even get the Murdochs what they wanted. If Hunt is the pudding of our increasingly meagre national meal, then he's stewed prunes to Mellor's knickerbocker glory.

He tries though. He's persevering with his plan to launch local TV channels and he's full of programme ideas: "People could compete to be the next leader of Sheffield city council – it could be really exciting," he says. Simon Cowell, eat your heart out.

Last week the government named 65 suitable homes for local stations. Some are very large: Glasgow, Birmingham, London (which seems like an excellent location for a TV channel – in fact, back in the day, the BBC was based there); others quite large: Cardiff, Newcastle, Aberdeen; and then there's the likes of Bangor, Barnstable, Haywards Heath, Haverfordwest, Limavady, Malvern, Reigate and Mold. The list seems perversely weighted in favour of places where hardly anyone lives.

To politicians, "local" is a powerful buzzword: local people, local services, local post offices, locally sourced produce – these are all phrases with positive connotations. "How can there be anything sinister in having more local things?" we think. The seductive rhetorical appeal of the Big Society is based on this – it disguises dereliction of duty as devolution of power.

The word seems less appetising when applied to politics and the media: local councils, local elections, local newspapers and local radio feel less buzzy. Just because I'm a metropolitan wanker doesn't mean I'm wrong to associate those phrases, with apologies to the noble exceptions (I seem to remember Three Counties Radio had an entertaining afternoon in about 1989), with incompetence and crap.

That's the sort of "local" that these TV stations will be. The rules under which they will operate sound awful but, Hunt must have been advised, are the only way they'll have a chance of solvency: they'll be allowed to broadcast as much advertising as they like as long as they provide an hour of local news a day. On the one hand, one to 23 is a horrendous programming to advertising ratio. But, on the other, it would be hard enough to produce a decent daily hour of news about Manchester, let alone Kidderminster or Salisbury. I was actually born in Salisbury but there's no guarantee that something that exciting happens there every day.

Does anyone seriously believe that these stations would produce programmes worth watching or news that isn't better delivered by the local press or the internet? Won't they just put the former out of business, be rendered irrelevant by the latter, or both? Why is Hunt so keen on this pointless trashy project?

One reason is that it's something positive-sounding to release to the media. Another is that it's a way of weakening the BBC. Few politicians within a sniff of power are fond of the BBC – until recently the LibDems were its greatest political allies. Both Labour and the Tories snipe away at it, while publicly proclaiming themselves supporters of "what it does best". They're lying because one of the things it does best is scrutinise politicians – for which activity New Labour rewarded it in 2004 by conniving at the removal of its director general.

But the Tories hate it most because, in its power, popularity and excellence, it represents a shining exception to what they consider to be the rule of the market. It just doesn't make sense to them; it's like looking at an Escher drawing, it makes them queasy. "How can poor frail Rupert Murdoch continue to scrape a living in a marketplace so skewed by this public service giant?" they argue. Although I suspect that, now Rupert has shown his frailty on television, they'll be less solicitous. In the guise of protecting free trade, they were really only kowtowing to power.

These new stations would not only be competition for the BBC's own local news, the expansion of which Ofcom prohibited three years ago, but would cost the corporation financially: it would have to provide £25m a year to cover the new stations' engineering and transmission costs and, for the first three years, spend an annual £5m buying content from them. Quite how poor that content would be, I dread to think. And where in the schedule would the BBC bury it? No more "pages from Ceefax" in the middle of the night. From 2013, it'll be old episodes of Focus on Mold.

That's not good value for the licence fee payer. In a funding environment where comedy and drama budgets are being slashed and even the brilliant BBC4 is threatened, pissing away millions on some provincial camcorder-and-advert channels is not in the national, or local, interest. Neither, incidentally, is forcing the licence fee payer to absorb the cost of the World Service, an excellent network but one which most licence holders don't receive.

Hunt is apt to criticise the BBC for wasting money and yet, in these instances, he's requiring it to do so. But, for him, there's no downside. If the BBC's programming worsens and the new local stations are unwatchable, people will just blame programme-makers and broadcasters.

It's not his job to entertain. As David Mellor knows to his cost, politicians don't get any credit for being fun.