In January 2014, when a critically endangered water lily was stolen from Kew Gardens, the former Conservative MP Louise Mensch tweeted on her Twitter, “Got to say what’s the point? Ordinary plant hardly worth saving.” The Conservatives can’t even see the point of flowers. It’s asking a lot to expect them to see the point of the BBC. It doesn’t even attract bees.

As a student in the late summer of 1988, I was backpacking in the far south-east of Turkey, blissfully unaware in those distant, pre-internet days that an undeclared civil war against the Kurds was now covertly under way. Not knowing I had anything to fear, I floated with vacant impunity through military manoeuvres and migrating masses, danced at an illegal Kurdish wedding, and happily ate a bag of nuts riddled with green worms. There is much to be said for stupidity. Ignorance was strength.

But on a minibus on a dark dirt road out of the frontier town of Diyarbakir, a Turkish man from Istanbul, with artificially curly dyed blond hair and a Samantha Fox T-shirt, loudly declared the Kurds dirty dogs, and deep-veined regional rivalries suddenly exploded into violence. I, wearing salmon pink Aladdin pants, intervened clumsily, as knives flashed in the aisle. “Let’s just cool it, OK guys? Peace, yeah?”

Then someone noted my accent. “British!”, said the men, putting away their weapons and laughing. “BBC! Del Boy fall through bar! Funniest scene ever. Licence fee very good value at twice price.”

It was a remarkable moment, and one made even more remarkable by the fact that the classic episode of Only Fools and Horses in which Del Boy falls through the bar was not even broadcast until four months later, yet the BBC pratfall was already accepted globally as a benchmark of quality entertainment in places miles from anything the Conservatives would recognise as civilised.

But the Conservatives’ assault on the BBC continues apace, doubtless to the delight of the shady media moguls with whom they regularly share clandestine Cotswold kitchen suppers, yachts, and borrowed police horses. And like all the Conservatives’ carefully chosen targets – foxes, lilies, and abstract ideas like beauty, truth, fairness and empathy wherever they are to be found – the BBC is either unable or unwilling to speak out in its own defence.

That incoherent howling in your garden at night? That’s foxes forcing their primitive vocal cords to articulate the argument against David Cameron’s sherry-swilling friends dismembering them for fun. Incoherent as it is, this nocturnal yowling remains more convincing than anything anyone at the battered BBC has felt able to say to justify the internationally respected, world-class broadcasting organisation’s own ongoing existence, at a cost to the individual annually equivalent to around 200 iTunes downloads.

The BBC’s five-year funding was supposed to be in place. But on Monday, in the sort of shady behind-closed-doors negotiations we were assured wouldn’t happen again after they did exactly the same thing last time, the government suddenly had the BBC 20% down on the deal, due to the apparently non-negotiable withdrawal of OAPs’ licence fee subsidy. Like Marie Antoinette, unaware of the difference between nourishment and subsistence, Cameron leans from the Versailles palace window and declares, “Let them watch Eamonn Holmes.”

On Tuesday, I stopped in at the BBC comedy offices, only recently a vast wing of White City’s iconic doughnut building, but today a small room above a 7-11 on Marylebone Road, from where all the unit’s globally lauded content is produced. A blabber-mouthed producer, high on petrol fumes and Pret a Manger breadless prawn sandwiches, explained the circumstances behind the killer budget decrease. Apparently, BBC director general Tony Hall had been forced at cattle-prod point into a sheep-shearing shed by the Conservative culture secretary, John Whittingdale, and quite simply bullied.

But Lord Hall’s willpower had proved strong, perhaps due to him being the only girl on the high school camping trip to the forest who wasn’t a downright filthy, pot-smoking slut; so Whittingdale had menaced him with some little gnashing mechanical dentures that jumped up and down by themselves on plastic webbed feet, biting at Hall’s penis, and then with clockwork, fez-wearing musical monkeys in waistcoats that smashed their cymbals hard on the baron’s testicles.

The consensus view in the corridors was that Hall’s emergence from Whittingdale’s corrugated-iron lair with a loss of 20% further BBC funding may look lamentable, but it was only the lord’s legendary negotiating skills – deployed calmly and collectedly, even as the culture secretary’s phlegm and mucus crystallised on his noble, opera-loving face, while mechanical monkeys pulverised his scrotum – that meant he had his genitals merely mutilated, rather than chopped off entirely and eaten by leading Conservatives.

Hall’s eleventh-hour rescuers, the eel-wrestling he-man Steve Backshall from Deadly 60 and the scuba-diving BBC Trust chair Rona Fairhead, have since let slip that the culture secretary already had fava beans pan-frying on the hob when they bashed his shed door in, and that had they arrived even seconds later things might have been much worse.

David Cameron’s embossed dinner invite, meanwhile, had clearly been dispatched hours earlier. Look closely at live parliamentary coverage from later last Monday and you’ll see an aide hand him an envelope, and upon opening it the prime minister licks his tiny lips and mouths to himself the simple word “Delicious!”

In an attempt to stop the story escalating, Lord Hall issued an official statement. Even though his penis had been mutilated by the culture secretary John Whittingdale’s arsenal of sickeningly modified clockwork toys, his testicles remained largely unscathed by the ferocious musical apes and dancing teeth, and he conceded that “far from being a cut, this is the right deal for my genitals in difficult economic circumstances”.

Last week I found myself watching a repeat of the May meeting of President Obama and the naturalist and former BBC programme director David Attenborough. Slowly and patiently, Attenborough made the case for nature. Its value was beyond the monetary. It was where our imaginations lived. And once it was gone it was gone. He could have been making the case for the BBC.

Stewart Lee’s A Room With A Stew is playing at the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh in August, and London from 12 September