It was 4.30am and I was bashing away at my keyboard. I was in my usually sunny mood for that time in the morning: smiling graciously to all and sundry; a cheerful quip about the fact that the taxi had been late and I had been kept waiting in bitter cold outside my house; warm praise for the delightful producer who had put together a programme running order that pleased me in every respect. You don’t believe me? Fair enough. I was in a foul mood and looking for a reason to have a row with someone.

It arrived on my screen a few minutes later. The way it works on Today is that producers and reporters suggest to the presenters links (or “cues”, in our jargon) for the different items. We then rewrite them, honing them to perfection — or, if you prefer to take the producers’ word for it, ripping the heart out of them and turning them into a parody of what was intended. The one on my screen was a monster. There was every cliché in the book and then some.

It was illiterate, verging on the grotesque. I exploded. “Who wrote this pile of s***!” I assumed it had been written by one of the producers on the previous “day shift”. Instead, a quiet voice behind me said, “I did.”

Oh, God. It’s one thing, in the time-honoured way of lily-livered journalists the world over, to tear someone apart when they’re not there to defend themselves. It is quite another to do it when the poor chap is sitting three feet away.

I braced myself for either a grovelling apology or a cup of coffee poured on my head. Instead, he pointed at a story on the front page of one of that morning’s newspapers. It was about me making an attack on bad English. His cue had been a hoax and I had fallen for it. The slightly scary thing was that I had believed it was genuine.

It would be ungracious of me — and, indeed, unfair — to attack my colleagues on Today. They are a clever, enthusiastic, hard-working and talented young bunch and it’s a pleasure to work with them. They are also well educated and have the degrees to prove it.

What few have is any grounding in grammar. To many of them punctuation and syntax are enduring mysteries. They are not remarkable in this. It is true of almost all the young people I have worked with for many years. They simply weren’t taught these disciplines at school. And that’s because it was deemed that they needed protecting from people engaged in a terrible conspiracy.

Conspiracy theorists are always good fun. You didn’t know that JFK was killed by an evil alliance between alien lizards and Elvis Presley? Where have you been? Then there’s all that rubbish about man going to the moon. Only the truly naive believe that one. The so-called “moon landing” was staged in a big barn in Arizona to get the president re-elected, wasn’t it? And of course Harold Wilson was a communist spy and Margaret Thatcher was a man.

It was back in the 1960s that liberal educationists discovered their conspiracy. It ran something like this. The teaching of English was being controlled by the ruling class and we, the lumpen proletariat, were victims of class oppression. We were being told how to speak and write and, downtrodden as we were, we conformed. We were encouraged to give up our natural and authentic manner of speaking, and we didn’t even know what was happening to us because, as one of the funniest television sketches of all time told us, we “knew our place”.

All this was part of a much wider war in which the enemy was not just the British upper classes with their home counties English, it was Great Literature. Who, after all, had set the standards for good English to which we should all aspire? The great writers of the past. And who were they? Why, they were Dead White Males (and Jane Austen and George Eliot, of course). Why should we touch our forelocks to them when they themselves were mostly toffs of a different era perpetuating the prejudices and injustices of their time? Thank God the liberals spotted it and came to our rescue! This conspiracy theory was always daft. If the liberals had stopped to think for a moment they would have realised that the way to win a battle with your oppressor is to use his own weapons against him. In this case, the weapon of good English.

The daft theory became so widely accepted that it effectively destroyed the teaching of good English. The effect was catastrophic and has been described in countless letters I have received over the years.

A professor at one of our leading universities told me he had seen literacy among undergraduates “declining alarmingly over the past decade”. A survey of university vice-chancellors last summer revealed that 48% had had to introduce special lessons in literacy and numeracy for first-year students.

I know of a professor who was in the habit of deducting marks in examinations for bad spelling, poor grammar or clumsy sentences. He would scribble in the margins of the examination papers to tell the candidate what he had done and why. He no longer does that. He is afraid that if his marking is challenged and an appeal conducted he will be held to have been discriminatory.