They never seem to learn. If you’re a top politician, attacking the BBC’s reporting is the most obvious way of showing that you’re worried about the way that people will react to what you’re doing.

The first reactions to George Osborne’s Autumn Statement had mostly been rather good. The next morning, he woke up and turned on his radio. And there was Norman Smith, assistant political editor for BBC News, on the Today program, talking about the scale of the heavy cuts in government spending that lay ahead and invoking George Orwell and The Road to Wigan Pier.

By the time Osborne went on the program to be interviewed by John Humphrys, he was boiling over with the kind of fury that government ministers from all parties develop when they feel the BBC is being too critical of them.

Why did the Blair government attack the BBC so savagely in 2003 over what Andrew Gilligan was saying about Iraq and the weapons of mass destruction? Like Norman Smith, Gilligan was speaking on the Today program, in the slot immediately after 6am: a quiet time, when the program’s audience is at its lowest. Unlike Smith, who said nothing that wasn’t at least defensible, Gilligan went too far during his graveyard slot and on too little evidence accused the government of knowing that there were no weapons of mass destruction.

Much better, of course, to have paid no attention or written a nasty note to the director general. But Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s chief press man, lost it. An utterly unnecessary war culminated in the disastrous Hutton report, which at first delighted Blair and Campbell. Later, they may well have wished that they had never commissioned it.