Back in October, the comedian Stewart Lee and the Thick of It creator Armando Iannucci hosted an episode of Strong Message Here, their BBC Radio 4 ‘comedy’ programme. While Strong Message Here is better than Radio 4’s Now Show and much of the interminable comedy the state broadcaster churns out, the programme has the same air of two quite clever chaps being extremely satisfied with themselves.

I share this story not to gloat (too much) or to relitigate but because the whole silly saga took nearly six months and a large portion of bloody-mindedness

This episode featured Lee discussing his concept of ‘fabulo-speculation’ a supposed technique whereby those on the right invent a complaint to attack their enemies, as though it were real. Think: ‘I’m not saying Keir Starmer is connected to these Ukrainian arsonists but some are saying there’s no smoke without fire, right?’

I don’t doubt that commentators on all sides do this kind of thing with abandon. But Lee – who has previously written on his blog that I am an evil right-winger (otherwise known as a research fellow at a 50-year-old think tank) – decided to single out an interview I had done on LBC about the Oxford Union president-elect who celebrated the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Discussing the interview, he claimed that when I had said the union may struggle to be viable in the long run after the row, I was employing the ‘fabulo-speculation’ technique. Needless to say, this was not true and there had been reports in the press that donations had been withheld from the Union by prospective donors in the wake of the controversy.

At no point did the show give me a right of reply. This was a shame as not only do I remember laughing my head off as an undergraduate watching a Stewart Lee show (in which he made up a very funny story about working on David Cameron’s Brasenose College ball committee at Oxford), but because I would have loved the chance to defend myself on the programme.

So instead, I was forced to battle against the BBC’s labyrinthine complaints process. Unlike other broadcasters, the BBC is allowed by Ofcom to act as its own judge several times before members of the public are ever allowed to take their grievances to the regulator.

This meant I had to wade through a treacle of ‘computer says no’ stages. Each time I was told that the BBC didn’t think the BBC had behaved poorly when it came to this BBC show. Eventually, I was allowed to escalate my complaint to the hallowed ‘Executive Complaints Unit’. After their deadline came and went, I informed them I was going to Ofcom to attempt to gain my right of reply.

This eventually resulted in a response, and the biggest shock at all, an admission of wrongdoing and an apology from Auntie:

I would judge that there was a strong implication that you were deliberately employing a “technique” in the knowledge that might lead to the spread of misinformation by others…. Given this, the fact that you were personally named in the BBC programme, and that you were not given the opportunity to respond to the allegation I would judge this was unfair to you under the guidelines. I hope you will accept my apology for the breach of standards your complaint identified, and my thanks for giving us an opportunity to investigate it.’

One former director of communications for the Conservative party told me, in astonishment, that they had never received a single apology from Auntie in all their years in that post.

Why does this matter? I share this story not to gloat (too much) or to relitigate but because the whole silly saga took nearly six months and a large portion of bloody-mindedness. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people will not be able to navigate the BBC’s Byzantine complaints procedure or will give up after months of not getting an adequate reply. The data seems to bear this out. Last month, it was reported that the BBC has upheld only 200 out of more than two million complaints made since 2017 – a 99.9 per cent rejection rate.

Clearly, all is not well in the land of regulation of media. In a recent paper, the Adam Smith Institute called for a series of sensible changes to the way that Ofcom and the BBC operate. One proposal was to scrap the BBC’s regulatory privilege, which sees the corporation marking its own homework on its own timetable. The scale of complaints not dealt with by the BBC means we should be hoping for many more apologies. But perhaps that’s just more ‘fabulo-speculation’ on my part.