There are mumblings at the BBC about whether the director-general, Tim Davie, will survive the Glastonbury debacle. More than 400 BBC staff were reportedly attending – including Davie himself – yet none called for the livestream to be stopped when the rap duo Bob Vylan led the chant “death, death to the IDF”. Insiders say staff “panicked” when they heard the Vylan chant, having been told repeatedly that it was not the BBC’s job to censor content. (Kneecap’s set was not broadcast live but instead uploaded later to iPlayer.) Davie, who wasn’t at Bob Vylan’s set, ordered the performance should not be available on iPlayer – but it remained on the streaming platform for five hours.
The mess follows BBC failings over Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone and the broadcaster’s refusal to screen another film about medics in Gaza (which eventually aired instead on Channel 4). The Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, has referred to a “problem of leadership”, while an insider tells me: “We’re making enemies on all sides in this. It’s a total mess. Tim Davie is far from decisive and yet is getting involved in editorial decisions, which then go to shit. We’re forever trying to guess where the next crisis will emerge from. Why should hard-working junior staff carry the can for mistakes he is making?”
Glastonbury bar worker “Helen from Wales”, who filmed Kneecap’s set from her phone and livestreamed it on TikTok, is emblematic of the nightmare Davie faces. Almost a quarter of a million people (presumably many of them young folk the BBC craves) have watched the video. And it cost her nothing – apart from burned fingers from an overheating phone. “When there’s censorship coming from large media institutions such as the BBC, I think it’s up to people like me to step in,” Helen said. Another satisfied BBC customer.
Anger is bubbling at the Daily Mail over cuts to the business and finance desks just weeks after another redundancy process concluded. Much fury is directed at the salaries of three big beasts: Boris Johnson on a £1m-a-year deal for an “embarrassing” weekly contribution; Nadine Dorries on a healthy whack for her latest Ozempic tale; and Richard Littlejohn, who, it is believed, is earning in excess of £600k for a column in which he often berates civil servants for working from home – written from his mansion in Florida. One insider said: “Those three alone could pay the salaries of 30 reporters. It’s disgusting.” Highly respected business editor Ruth Sunderland is said to be among those facing the chop. Apparently such content fails to drive traffic and is not suitable for hiding behind the Mail+ paywall, which has reportedly become bosses’ “absolute obsession”.
GB News’s Bev Turner will front the channel’s first foray into the US. Turner, a right-wing Covid sceptic who has backed Russell Brand and raised concerns about climate crisis reporting, is off to Washington for a new nightly show. “Sending Bev to the US is like sending coals to Newcastle,” a former colleague says. “It’s not like the States is short of people with batshit crazy ideas who can read an autocue.”
Never a wallflower, Piers Morgan has been celebrating hitting four million subscribers for his YouTube show Uncensored. A source close to Morgan says: “It’s a work-in-progress. Piers has always been aiming for world domination – so just another 8.058 billion viewers to go…”
Snout line: Got a story? Write to tips@newstatesman.co.uk
[See also: Morgan McSweeney’s moment of truth]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 02 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Just Raise Tax!