This morning, I wrote that Mark Thompson would "bow to pressure" and revise downwards the BBC's licence fee bid. In the event, he did cut the bid - to RPI plus 1.8% - but far from bowing to pressure, his speech was calculated to ratchet it up. Give us the money, he told the government, or digital switchover and the move to the north of England will be on the skids.
The threat was aimed directly at one man: Gordon Brown, and with very good reason.
Last week, the BBC's business editor, Robert Peston, said that the Chancellor was blocking the culture department's support for an above-inflation licence-fee hike. The story was authoritative: Peston is Brown's biographer and the pair are known to be close.
With the licence fee negotiations entering the final furlong, Thompson had to act fast and decisively. A long arranged lecture to the Smith Institute in London today provided the ideal opportunity. To ensure the message was not lost on the motley group of eggheads and policy wonks that generally attend these events, the BBC's press office rang up journalists to prompt them to attend.
It was a story worth hearing. In threatening to pull the rug from under the move to Salford, Thompson appealed directly to supportive Labour backbenchers in key northern constituencies. And by saying that digital switchover could fail unless it is funded properly, he raised the prospect of millions of voters' TV screens going blank just around the time of the election. Not a situation that the man who would be Prime Minister - Gordon Brown - would like to find himself in:
"Be under no illusion. This is a project of great scale and intricacy. The risks are formidable. If it is under-resourced, it will fail. It's as simple as that - and the failure will impact on millions of households." Messages don't get much more powerful than that.
Thompson didn't pull his punches elsewhere in the speech. He blamed BSkyB for attempting to sabotage the digital switchover. "They [Sky] believe that the build-out of digital terrestrial is quite unnecessary and that those people who can't currently get Freeview or cable should simply be told to use Sky if they wish to convert to digital.
"The licence fee is the main funding mechanism for switchover. If you want switchover to be abandoned or to fail, what better place to start than to try to use your influence - that influence which Rupert Murdoch boasts about so freely in this week's New Yorker - to put a squeeze right now on the licence fee?"
Ouch.
Even those who are not normally supportive of Thompson were in awe. John Whittingdale, the Tory chairman of the Commons media select committee said that by holding a gun to the government's head in this way, the BBC director general had put himself in a very powerful negotiating position. If digital switchover goes wrong, said Whittingdale, it would be an "election-losing issue".
And this was the key point. Thompson, in effect, had decided to send the Chancellor a simple message: "Give us what we want or the voters will boot you out."
Over to you, Gordon.
