At a Media Society dinner to honour Jenni Murray last year, I found myself sitting next to Ceri Thomas, the editor of Radio 4's Today programme. I told him I had some thoughts about Edward Stourton, one of the presenters. "Don't tell me," he said, "he doesn't make your pulse race."
It was an oddly cruel and surprising remark - and injudicious, as it was not made in confidence and there was thus no reason why I should not repeat it. I stored it away.
Not at all, I said, I was a fan: I liked Stourton because he was calm, fair and civil. I still feel that. I don't want my pulse to beat any faster than it does. I do want the intellectual coherence, sang-froid, Queen's English, good-mannered curiosity and rationality that he seems to embody. When people describe him as "posh Ed", those, I think, are the qualities that they mean, not just the simple fact that he went to Ampleforth and Cambridge.
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Little did I know that Thomas and his bosses (who are all in BBC News, as it is that division that runs Today, rather than BBC Audio and Music, which runs Radio 4) were even then, in all probability, plotting to oust Stourton from the show he has graced for 10 years. That was announced some months later, after Stourton had been told by a newspaper reporter that he was being sacked.
His last day as a presenter of Today will be this coming Friday, the melancholic eighth anniversary of 9/11. As indicated by the furore that erupted over his dismissal, he will be much missed, but will at least continue to be heard as a reporter on the programme - his first piece, on the second Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, goes out later this month - and in Radio 4 series such as Iconoclasts, which returns on Wednesday. None of this, incidentally, should be taken as criticism of his successor, the able, glossy and ultra-smooth Justin Webb. (If Stourton is silk, then Webb is satin.)
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With characteristic restraint, Stourton says he is "sad to lose my Today seat". It would be strange if he were not. Breakfast shows, as Tony Blackburn remarked bitterly after he got dumped as Radio 1's breakfast host, have a buzz about them that no other programmes do. On any station, it is almost always the breakfast show that is the most popular, and this is certainly the case at Radio 4. Breakfast is the one time of day when radio audiences are far bigger than television ones (11m adults listen to BBC radio on a weekday at 8am, which is twice as many as are watching television). This is where any radio broadcaster is most exposed and tested. To connect with an audience at breakfast, and then to build it, are considerable achievements. Congratulations, then, to Chris Moyles, despite his occasionally oafish behaviour. Tomorrow he becomes the longest-serving breakfast host (five years and eight months) in Radio 1's history, beating Blackburn's record, which has stood since 1973.
The real issue in all this is not whether Stourton makes the pulse race or, at the age of 51, is past his sell-by date. It is whether a publicly funded body such as the BBC should axe a fine broadcaster with an unblemished record without having to give any official reason - whether to the BBC Trust, Ofcom, parliament, government or us, who pay for the BBC and without whom it would not be able to act in the capricious manner of which it is capable. It can and it does, but it has no moral right to.