The BBC is Deep in Crisis

Some inside scoop on what's happened and why

Commenting wearily on a setback a few years ago when I worked there, I said to Tim Davie, “I wouldn’t have stayed at the BBC all these years if I couldn’t eat shit”. I regretted it instantly, thinking I might have overstepped the mark or offended him.

But to my surprise he roared with laughter and said, “tell me about it!” That honesty is one reason why I’m sorry to see him go.

The thing that I found gobsmacking at the time was the degree to which even the Director General felt he was at the mercy of forces beyond his control. I mean are you the head honcho or just another bureaucrat getting snookered because of mistakes by subordinates and conflicting public expectations that can never quite be met?

Ever since my post here on Saturday, my phone’s been buzzing with messages from those who remain inmates, all the more so since the DG’s resignation. So let’s cut through what has and hasn’t happened.

The reason for the crisis is that management consistently ignored the findings of its own internal system for tackling accusations of bias. Because of that failure on a whole variety of issues – from gender to Trump, race, and Gaza – a report by Michael Prescott, someone the BBC was paying to tackle these issues confidentially not some werewolf of a populist politician, leaked to the Telegraph.

Chair Samir Shah’s letter to the House of Commons culture committee also highlights some basic issues of competence, I think. It revealed that the BBC’s Editorial Guidance and Standards Committee had discussed the misleading editing of Donald Trump’s speech in January and May of this year, which means they knew about the problem for ten months before the newspapers published Prescott’s report.

It’s a serious mistake, why hadn’t they gripped it sooner? Would this crisis ever have happened if they hadn’t been publicly caught out? Whatever the reasons, the Corporation now faces the possibility of being sued by Trump.

One of Prescott’s main conclusions was that he couldn’t get the programme makers to engage properly with vital questions. “I have been surprised just how defensive Deborah [Turness, outgoing director of news] and Jonathan [Munro, now acting director of news] in particular have been whenever issues have been raised”, he wrote.

She resigned on Saturday night, but arriving at the BBC on Monday morning insisted, “the BBC news is not institutionally biased… mistakes are made but there’s no institutional bias”. OK, well why resign then? Because she said, “the buck stops with me”.

It sounded like ‘sorry, not sorry’ and that she’d rather made Prescott’s point for him all over again. Argue about the term ‘institutional bias’ if you will, but surely the errors that the Corporation’s own internal scrutineers had flagged up across that broad range of issues speak to a systemic problem?

This convinces me that she was right to resign on Saturday evening. But why Tim Davie also?

The version being put around by self-styled ‘friends of the BBC’ was that he’d been got by a ring wing plot. Their favourite enemy is Robbie Gibb, who I knew well as deputy editor of Newsnight, then worked at Theresa May’s communications director at Downing Street (for which he was knighted) and now sits on the board.

But this really doesn’t explain why Davie left, because as Nick Robinson explained in a monologue on Radio 4’s Today programme, “friends of Sir Robbie insist he has repeatedly and consistently supported Tim Davie and wanted him to stay” and that this isn’t just about one Tory appointee anyway because, “a majority of the BBC Board appear to agree with [Prescott] that there is a problem of institutional bias”.

Those who fulminate about a ‘coup’ need to produce their evidence. Naturally the BBC has lots of enemies from press barons to the populist left and right. But failing to deal internally with issues like those raised by Prescott is a gift to the destroyers.

The idea of a boardroom coup has no basis. My own communications with former colleagues confirm what Nick said and add a very important detail: that after Turness resigned, the chair, Samir Shah, insisted to Davie that he still had the confidence of the entire board.

But the day after Turness went, he decided to resign anyway. That’s not what the board wanted and at the working level too, plenty of people inside the BBC regret that.

They felt Davie was the best person to steer the Corporation into the renewal of its Royal Charter, which expires at the end of 2027. It will be a vitally important negotiation for the BBC as a body funded by a universal TV license fee.

There had been guarded optimism about this inside the organisation following the election of Keir Starmer’s government. There was a feeling that the days of coercion that the BBC faced under Boris Johnson were well and truly over. But perhaps Davie had detected that Rachel Reeves, as a chancellor beset by cost of living concerns, would drive a very hard bargain on the charter.

Or maybe it was the constant partisan assaults on the Corporation that caused him to press ‘send’ on that resignation email. From the disgrace of Huw Edwards to the mishap at Glastonbury these weighed heavily on him, and a friend of his told me a couple of months back that after that last controversy that the DG was ‘looking towards the exit’.

I don’t think anyone who hasn’t walked in Davie’s box-fresh trainers can quite understand that stress. Just ask yourself, would you want the job?

Ultimately though he may have resigned simply out of a sense of honour and appreciation of the seriousness of this. “This couldn’t be another case of ‘deputy heads must roll’” one insider told me this morning. So for better or worse, Tim Davie is done with eating you know what.