There is little to beat the thrill of finding a letter you didn’t know existed and being transported back in time and deep into your family’s history. Dated January 1955, it is addressed to ‘Desmond and Evelyn’ and urges them to show ‘tenacity, resolution and COURAGE’. It is signed ‘Pater’. These were the qualities deemed necessary for the son of an English colonel to marry the daughter of a German Jewish refugee against her father’s ferocious opposition. ‘I have the greatest respect for the good qualities of your race and I respect their fighting qualities,’ the man who would become my English grandfather wrote to the couple who would become my mum and dad. Thousands of miles away ‘Pa Rosenberg’ – as he called the man who would become my other grandfather – was indeed fighting. He had gone to see the British consul in Tokyo – the city he’d made his home – to urge him to intervene and block the union. ‘Your daughter wants to marry an Englishman?’ our man in Tokyo asked before sucking on his pipe to play for time. Recognising that there was only one option open to him as the representative of Her Britannic Majesty, his answer was clear: ‘Seems to me… a jolly good idea.’

It is my German Jewish grandparents whom I had in mind when I dared to defend the BBC against those who have sought to weaponise our mistakes. It was they who taught me the value of what remains – despite all its weaknesses – a great and much-loved British institution. Whenever I visited them we followed the same daily ritual. After lunch we would sit in silence as my grandfather lovingly held his giant Roberts radio in both hands and waited for the news from Broadcasting House to begin with the words ‘This is London’. They never lived in Britain but they always listened to the BBC. In wartime Shanghai – the first city they fled to after the Nazis took power in Berlin – he, his wife and my mother hid in a cupboard every day to listen to those reassuring words on a banned shortwave radio. They knew the value of news they could trust.

Those days are long since gone, say the BBC’s vocal critics. Their argument is that even if the BBC’s own editorial failings don’t destroy trust in it, the digital revolution will soon make us irrelevant. Why, some ask, do we not simply allow broadcasting to be like newspapers with competing private right-wing and left-wing news networks? We don’t need to look into a crystal ball to see what that would be like. We can just look at the hyper-partisan and all too often hyperbolic talk shows masquerading as news in the United States. At a time of deep and growing political and cultural divisions, do we really want our children and grandchildren to depend on a diet of propaganda and pap generated by bots in Moscow and Beijing and algorithms in California?

‘There he goes again,’ I hear the BBC’s critics shout. Perhaps some are readers of The Spectator who nodded along to Rod Liddle’s recent denunciation of his former employer. So let me be clear with you and with Rod – the man who first asked me to present the Today programme but who now accuses me of being ‘puffed up… pompous… jabbering’. Yes, we have made mistakes in the way we have covered some of the most contentious issues in a time of deep political and cultural divisions – the Israel/Gaza war, trans and Trump. Yes, we can and should do better. Yes, we should respond more quickly and more openly to those who feel their trust has been betrayed. And, yes, there is an entirely legitimate debate about whether there is any need for public-sector broadcasting and ‘impartial’ broadcast news in an era of multiple competing voices and platforms. However, I can’t help noticing that very few of our critics are prepared to tell people that their dream of a restructured, reformed and slimmed-down BBC would mean the end of shared national moments, whether Strictly, The Traitors, the Proms, the Remembrance Day service, Wimbledon or Match of the Day, Gavin & Stacey, The Archers, Desert Island Discs and, dare I say, even the Today programme.

As it happens, I’ve just caught up with GB News’s exclusive sit-down with President Trump. The interviewer began by declaring that ‘the pace of change here is remarkable’. She went on to praise a speech she described as ‘one of the greatest moments… I loved it, it was brilliant’; the President’s state visit was ‘beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like it. Incredible’. She added that: ‘You’ve just won a world record for having the best golf course in the world’; and: ‘You’re obviously a really good dad. Your children really like you… Or love you.’ Memorable.

Part of the challenge of ‘impartial news’ is the depth of anger many listeners feel which is being fed by a diet of gloom and doom in some newspapers. ‘I’m now beginning to think Britain is finished,’ read one headline which caught my eye. ‘Britain has a 75 per cent chance of going full banana republic,’ read another. A third read: ‘Why everyone who can leave Britain should do so before it’s too late.’ Perhaps we need to be more responsive to the anger felt on all sides, but thinking back to my grandparents who fled the Nazis and my grandfather who fought in two world wars makes me yearn for a little perspective.

Let me give my grandfather the final word in this Christmas issue. In another letter I have just read, ‘Pater’ asks his son whether he and his wife-to-be want ‘turkey, goose or two cockerel’ before giving him an early present: some unrequested advice. ‘Do remember that self-discipline is absolutely necessary for a life that matters. When drink is in then BRAINS are out.’ I wish all Spectator readers, who clearly have big brains and may well enjoy the odd drink, a happy Christmas wherever you choose to get your news from.