There used to be a joke that the Foreign Office should be replaced with a fax. The money, wags said, should be spent instead on the British Council and the BBC World Service, which did far more to promote Britain than diplomats munching canapés in dusty outposts. The joke had enough edge for diplomats to take it seriously: their operation is now so lean that it is almost anorexic. But money to project Britain’s “soft power” has not been lacking. And Alistair Darling’s latest settlement now gives the BBC the cash to catch up with rivals who realise that ruling the airwaves nowadays counts for far more than ruling the waves.

The £70 million extra for the BBC over three years will allow the World Service to keep the proposed new Arabic language television service on air 24 hours a day. It also gives the green light for a new Farsi language television service to be beamed to Iran next year. Britain’s voice has long been heard in the Middle East, thanks to radio broadcasts from Bush House. Now, in this troubled region, its face will be seen as well.

Television, pundits now acknowledge, is where politics is formed. I remember when CNN began: I was a correspondent in Washington. Not only was it suddenly far easier to report a White House press conference, but the political events once seen only by a few were now broadcast live around America – and later the world. It changed the way wars were fought: even Saddam understood the need to keep the CNN cameras in Baghdad during the Gulf War.

In Goebbels’s day, propaganda had a bad name. But the Nazi inventor of the Big Lie saw one thing clearly: whoever put out the news first could control its impact – at first. The BBC saw something even more important: whoever puts out news that is accurate can retain the listeners’ trust over the long haul.

The BBC likes to recall the extraordinary tribute by Mikhail Gorbachev, who admitted that, during the attempted coup that confined him to his Black Sea dacha, he learnt about what was going on by listening to the BBC. I heard equally vivid testimony a decade earlier, when two other Western correspondents and I spent Russian Christmas Eve (January 6) with a priest in Suzdal. The evening was spent in feasting and banter. But when our KGB minder briefly left the room, the priest, suddenly serious, noted that I had written a harsh piece about the recent Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. I wondered how he knew. “I heard it on the BBC. I listen every day,” he said. Our minder returned. “Come on! More vodka!” the priest quickly joked.

Old BBC hands regret that some language broadcasts were closed to fund the new Arabic television. But what is the use nowadays of BBC Greek, Hungarian or Polish broadcasts? And where is accurate news more needed or crucial to world peace than in the Middle East? Moscow, Tehran and Washington spend a fortune on broadcasting their versions of the truth. It’s time Britain matched them – with the truth.

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