The BBC has outwitted Whittingdale in today's online recipe soufflé

We didn’t blame the BBC for withdrawing our recipes. We blamed the anti-BBC Government that is bearing down on our second-favourite national institution after the NHS

The present round of wrangling over the BBC’s charter renewal has mostly gone the BBC’s way (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

Hats off to the BBC public affairs department. Under pressure from John Whittingdale, the Culture Secretary, to make itself less popular, the BBC announced that it would stop putting recipes on the internet.

Brilliant. The one thing that is obviously peripheral to what the BBC does, but the one thing that nearly everyone in the country has used and is grateful to the BBC for: letting us Google how long to roast a joint or how to cook an aubergine. It is not what we thought we needed the BBC for, but when we were faced with a choice between a BBC recipe and one from a blogger in Topeka, Kansas, measuring things in cups and eggplants, we were glad that Auntie was there.

So when the BBC threatened to make itself unpopular by withdrawing this unasked-for bonus – “Ready, steady, don’t cook” – we didn’t blame the BBC. We blamed the anti-BBC Government that is bearing down on our second-favourite national institution after the NHS.

Then as we reported this morning the BBC said that it wasn’t actually going to force us to wonder whether American fluid ounces are the same as British ones (they’re 4 per cent bigger if you do ever need to know). The BBC was going to stop adding new recipes to its website. All the old ones will stay there, all 11,000 of them. Over time, they may get a bit harder to find, for reasons that a young person who knows what search engine optimisation is might be able to explain. But over time, we will learn how to download recipes direct from the cloud to the inside of our eyelids, so we can worry about that later.

As the nation breathes a sigh of relief and wonders what to do with those slightly overripe avocados tonight, do we decide that Whittingdale is not such a terrible ideologically driven politician after all? We do not.

We think the BBC has fought off an attack on our way of life, and have been reminded what an important part of our British birthright it is. We do not think that Whittingdale was making a reasonable point that the licence fee is increasingly out of line with how most people use the BBC’s services, on their phones and through non-live video streaming.

The present round of wrangling over the BBC’s charter renewal – its charter expires at the end of this year – has mostly gone the BBC’s way. Recent news stories about how Whittingdale was going to decide what programmes the BBC would be allowed to schedule against its popular ITV rivals are mischievous. But they are simply the logical extension of Whittingdale’s comments that the BBC should be constrained in using its dominant position as a broadcaster to squeeze its commercial competitors.

And that is Whittingdale’s fault for falling into the same trap that catches all Conservative cabinet ministers responsible for public service broadcasting: they want the BBC to be successful, but they don’t want it to distort competition in the media market. Those two aims are incompatible, and because the BBC is popular a minister who tries to restrict it is asking for trouble.

And the BBC is getting quite good at defending itself, as the recipe for “storm in teacup” has shown.