I was 23 years old when I succeeded in getting a job at the BBC. I had failed to be taken on as a studio manager in London – I think the interviewer guessed I would be interested in broadcasting than the technical side of radio – so it was: ‘Thank you, Miss Murray and goodbye.’

Never one to give up, I tried again and was welcomed into the local radio newsroom in Bristol and slowly began to climb my way up the greasy pole.

I was 70 when I resigned, having spent 33 years presenting Woman’s Hour, proud to have spent my life working in an organisation I loved.

But by 2020, I was beginning to feel less proud.

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Tim Daviea perfectly nice man, had taken over as director-general from Tony Hall and I could feel things going wrong in my bones. Tim had worked at Pepsi as vice-president of marketing and finance, failed to become a Conservative councillor in 1993 and left Pepsi in 2005, becoming the BBC’s director of marketing, communications and audiences.

He took responsibility for radio in 2008 and gained a place on the executive board, but I’d always wondered, ‘Where is his journalism?’

The director-general’s job is huge and complex, but surely nothing – even managing thousands of staff, being good with money and negotiating well with governments regardless of their politics – is as important as a strong journalistic instinct.

It’s crucial that the director-general, responsible for the BBC’s home and international news and current affairs broadcasts, has worked from the bottom to the top as a journalist (as Tony Hall had).

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He or she must know how news stories are uncovered, how the facts are checked and, in an organisation that prides itself on impartiality, ensure there is no evidence of pressure from activists to tell a story in a particular way.

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The buck stops at the director-general, who carries the reputation of the BBC on his or her shoulders.

Of course, mistakes are made and must be acknowledged and apologised for, but they should not be happening on the dangerous scale we have been made aware of over the past week.

I remember seeing the Panorama report about Donald Trump and being horrified that he appeared to encourage violence. Wrong. It was what someone thought was a clever little edit.

Equally, why did programme-makers not disclose the fact they’d hired the son of a Hamas official to narrate a documentary on Gaza?

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Then there was the issue that ultimately resulted in me leaving my job – the trans question.

It started around 2017 with a request from middle management to put one’s pronouns on email sign-offs. I protested to my editor. No way would She/Her appear on mine. I was told not to make a fuss.

I didn’t have to do it. Some of the younger members of the team didn’t seem to mind it, but why was the impartial BBC suggesting this at all?

Over the following few months, I began to understand the extent to which the BBC had been seduced by Stonewall, the organisation advocating LGBTQ+ rights, and the trans lobby. Discussions on air about the impact of trans activists on women were suddenly not allowed.

I was so angry I wrote an article for The Sunday Times, furious that trans women were demanding that breast-feeding should be called chest-feeding, children should be given medical treatment for believing they’d been born into the wrong body and that trans women should be allowed into spaces designed for women – toilets, rape crisis centres and hospital staff changing rooms.

I asked to discuss all this on Woman’s Hour where, regardless of what I had written, I believed I could be trusted to be an unbiased chair. I was told ‘no’. I would not be allowed to host any discussions on the trans question. In fact I would never be allowed to talk about it on the programme.

I was appalled, then baffled when, in response, the editors quoted George Orwell at me: ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’ – a phrase written on the wall outside BBC Broadcasting House in London.

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What a line to throw at someone who wanted the freedom to debate an issue affecting women across the nation.

How could the BBC prevent the audience of a programme called Woman’s Hour from discussing the impact of activists calling for radical changes to the language, for trans women to be held in women’s prisons, for them to have access to women’s refuges – moves which threatened much of the work I and many other feminists had done to secure the safety of women and girls?

I could not accept being gagged on what was the greatest danger to women’s hard-won rights imaginable.

How had we come to a point where politicians and public broadcasters were unable to decide whether a woman could have a penis? I had to get out and find somewhere I could express my gender-critical views.

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There were colleagues who tried to persuade me to stay. They would remind me of all the gains I’d made as a champion of my sex. But it was for that very reason that I couldn’t stay, although it broke my heart to go.

October 2020. I walked out of Broadcasting House, my second home for so long, and passed by the statue of Orwell vowing to use my liberty to tell people things they ‘do not want to hear’.

Some of the journalists I left behind tell me things have got a bit better recently. The BBC has separated from the Stonewall Diversity Champions scheme, an employer programme encouraging LGBTQ+ support; and there are no longer links to Mermaids – the charity for trans children and young people – from the BBC website.

But still there’s evidence that the bias persists despite the Supreme Court ruling this summer that the definition of sex is biological.

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Why, for example, were the seven nurses who complained about a trans woman being allowed to use their changing room at Darlington Memorial Hospital grilled like criminals on Woman’s Hour?

Who typed ‘pregnant people’ on Martine Croxall’s news script? And why did the BBC formally rebuke the presenter for the way she corrected the phrase to ‘pregnant women’.

Why are trans women sex offenders described as women when their crimes are clearly male?

It’s time the BBC acknowledged it has been far from impartial on the trans debate.

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And now that the BBC – which, by the way, I still love and admire for all the good and important work it does – needs a new director-general, you won’t be surprised to hear that I think it should be a woman.

It’s staggering that this 103-year-old organisation has had 17 director-generals (I survived ten of them) and they were all guess what? Ah yes. Men.

Wouldn’t this be a great opportunity to change that? There are some pretty formidable women who could fill the role, bringing both their experience as women and their journalistic nous to one of the hardest jobs in media in a time of increased competition – and with a charter renewal coming up.

My money’s on Charlotte Moore. She quit her very well-paid job as the BBC’s chief content officer earlier this year. I don’t know why she left but she’d be welcomed back.

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She’s tough, outspoken, liked at the BBC and good at commissioning popular programmes, including The Traitors and Gavin & Stacey.

For me, the next director-general of the BBC must be a journalist – and it’s high time that journalist was a woman!

It’s right to tell kids about cancer

How very wise of the Prince and Princess of Wales to be honest with their children when Kate was given a diagnosis of cancer.

My sons were in their teens when I found out I had breast cancer, but even if they’d been younger, I would have told them everything. I remember their shock, but then we went through it all together.

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William is right when he says keeping things secret makes children anxious. Hiding things from them doesn’t work. It’s always far better to tell them the truth and work through things together.

Sir Alan Bates has waited too long for compensation for the pain he suffered as a result of the Post Office scandal. He now has a handsome sum, and hopes it will lead to others getting their money quickly. But how will he spend it? On a shed! Fittingly unpretentious, and the reason we all love him.

What a stupid pet shop owner

What was Pets Corner tycoon, Dean Richmond, thinking when he held a huge fireworks display on his estate, allegedly causing a neighbour’s horse to bolt in terror and die?

You’d think the owner of a pet shop would know animals and fireworks don’t mix.

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Oh, how I miss my funny friend

It’s almost ten years since Victoria Wood died from cancer, too young at 62, but at last one of the best modern comedians and playwrights we’ve ever had is to have her own theatre. The Old Laundry Theatre in Bowness-on-Windermere will be renamed the Victoria Wood Theatre. On Woman’s Hour, she was the only interviewee who could silence me by making me laugh so much. I still miss her.