VETERAN BBC newsman John Simpson told a Winchester audience the corporation is on its last legs in the wake of funding cuts.

“I believe that the BBC is in its last stages,” he said.

“Cuts that we have been seeing will be nothing to the cuts that we are going to see, because the Government will ensure that the licence fee is cut back massively and this ten years will be the last effective as we know it,” he said.

“To continue it will have to take advertising and other ways of funding itself.

“It will be a slightly better version of national public radio and other outfits in the States.”

The world affairs editor was speaking as part of a high-profile appeal to refurbish Winchester Cathedral.

He also said he thinks British newspapers “have it in for” the BBC.

“Every day you read The Times, Telegraph, Daily Mail and some of the other trash that passes off as newspapers, and see story after story about the BBC’s waste of money,” he said.

“There’s a desire to see the end of the BBC. The people of this country would not agree with it, or the large numbers won’t, but there’s a desire to see the end of public service broadcasting paid for by the licence fee.”

Mr Simpson has spent his working life with the corporation, and on his first day as a reporter in the 1970s he was punched in the stomach by then-Prime Minister Harold Wilson, after asking if he was about to call a General Election.

He has reported from more than 120 countries, interviewing scores of world leaders, including Saddam Hussein, who, last Friday, he admitted he “rather liked”.

He had the audience in fits of laughter after relaying an encounter with the Iraqi leader violently forcing an old man in the street to say he loved him.

Mr Simpson said: “We are not talking about a liberal democrat politician here. I know it’s an ugly story, but it does show a sense of humour doesn’t it?”

The outspoken journalist also said he tries not to “have an agenda” and thinks the UK’s leaders are “useless”.

Some 250 people attended the talk in the Guildhall, where Mr Simpson was interviewed by former director of the Winchester Festival, John Miller.

The Very Rev James Atwell, Dean of Winchester, concluded the evening by thanking Mr Simpson for his “openness and honesty”.