It was January when Lord Carter, newly ennobled minister charged with collecting the disparate strands of UK digital communications policy into legislation, invited the BBC’s leadership to a meeting in his eighth-floor office near Westminster Abbey.

He told Mark Thompson, the corporation’s cerebral director-general, and Sir Michael Lyons, feisty chairman of the BBC Trust, its governing body, to stop “sermonising” about their exclusive right to the licence fee. The £3.6bn ($5.9bn, €4.2bn) tax on British households with a television set had been used solely for the BBC since time immemorial but that was set to change, Stephen Carter told them.