Researching Jamie Angus – the editor of the Today programme – I was struck that this would be only his second media interview since his appointment in May 2013. This relative anonymity, it transpires, is a quite deliberate choice.

He told me he had “never really had a public profile. I’ve never wanted to be in front of the camera or to broadcast. I don’t want to be a public figure. Lots of people just want to be on air – they want more than anything else to be on TV, or to a lesser extent the radio; and they’ll do anything to do that. You have to be so intensely ambitious and slightly egotistical to be a presenter; you have to be prepared to make enormous sacrifices in the way in which you live your life – to jump on a plane or a train at a moment’s notice and leave your wife and kids behind, if you have them. If you really want to, then it’s great, but I personally think the more interesting jobs in the media are the ones no one talks about.” “The ones like this” he added, chuckling.

Although this pride in anonymity led to him jokingly to describe the claim that he had ‘risen without trace’ as a “punch the air moment”, Angus notes that the Today role was not an unknown challenge; having begun his time at the BBC as a researcher, he describes himself as “Today man and boy” – in addition to his editorship of the World at One and Newsnight in the interim – the latter “in a rather sticky moment” between the Savile and McAlpine scandals.

However, previously, he “didn’t do much journalism at Oxford – just a very small amount. I didn’t find it particularly easy to get into, or particularly fulfilling, so I did other things. I worked in politics for a couple of years – for the Liberal Democrats, before the Liberal Democrats were a party of government…”

It is clear that he is still – willingly or otherwise – involved in politics; I asked him about the occasion in January when Today became a news story in itself, after David Cameron criticised presenter Sarah Montague on air for her use of the term ‘Islamic State’. He conceded “he kind of got us on that one… We should have said ‘so-called Islamic State’. My own view is that actually the most important thing is does the audience understand what you’re talking about, and I think the question of whether or not some sections of either Muslim communities or other communities find the term ‘Islamic State’ offensive is not clear-cut. But in this instance I don’t have a complaint about what he said… he saw the opportunity to give us a bit of a slap, so he did and we took it.”

I raised, too, the complaint Labour Leave founder Kate Hoey made in her interview with Varsity that BBC journalists talking about leaving ‘Europe’ – the continent – casts anti-EU campaigners as anti-European and isolationist. For Angus, “there’s just a lot of aggro around terminology – you know, words really matter. And the values people ascribe to those words really matter; the problem is not everyone agrees what those values are… Some people think some labels are not the right labels, and other people disagree with them.” He went on: “that’s just the beauty of working with language; when you’re on the radio all you have is language… I think the idea that you tell John Humphrys what he can and can’t say – a broadcaster of his experience – is a bit fanciful really.”

Students to whom John Humphrys’s voice is familiar may be interested to hear that ‘young’, for Radio 4, is 35 to 54. That’s the audience segment I worry about the most: ‘are they becoming heavy Today listeners?’… Once you get them in the tradition, you’ve kind of won, really.” Fortunately for Today, “audiences are living longer than we thought they would and they’re still coming in at a sufficient rate at the bottom end to make up for what the grim reaper achieves at the top end. But that’s no reason for complacency.”

And what about students who do not listen to Radio 4, or indeed get much from the BBC at all? “Over time, the BBC has to prove there is a public benefit to there being a universal licence fee. We have to win the argument that this slightly unusual funding mechanism – unique, almost, internationally – that compels people to pay a flat fee for a service, is the right one. We have to demonstrate that benefit.”

He argues: “there are very few institutions now left nationally who can bring the country together around a particular event, or story, or artistic theme – the BBC is almost the only one left that can do that. And we think there’s a public benefit that everyone has a stake in it… So the argument about whether that’s the right funding mechanism will go on, but the fundamental idea of public service broadcasting that everyone has got a stake, everyone has got a voice, everyone derives some benefit: there’s no reason that shouldn’t work in a modern, digital world.”

Whether or not the BBC does win the argument, it’s clear that the Today programme won’t be disappearing from public life any time soon, even if its editor is more at ease directing the spotlight than being in it himself.