Tim Davie, the outgoing director general of the BBC, was not pushed out. He was determined to jump, deaf to the pleas of other managers and his chairperson, Samir Shah. He’d had enough of being the nation’s whipping boy. His decision was, according to one friend, “80 per cent” about the relentless pressures of the hardest job in British public life.
He was responsible for Gregg Wallace’s missing underpants. He was responsible for Bob Vylan’s anti-Israeli pirouettes at Glastonbury. He was responsible for an idiotic and dishonest piece of editing of a Donald Trump speech in an edit suite he probably couldn’t find with a map. He was responsible for Martine Croxall’s eye-roll when her autocue script read “pregnant person” rather than woman.
Of course, he was not directly responsible for any of those things and nobody really thought he was. But every time the BBC screwed up, Davie’s face, with a rictus grin delicately poised halfway between “so sorry” and “piss off”, appeared on front pages. By the end, he’d become Tim Vylan, and he didn’t like it. Now the BBC board has the small job of finding somebody mad and self-deluded enough to want to step into his shoes.
Whoever does can reflect on the fact that this local BBC crisis has now become an international story which affects Britain’s reputation round the world, with Tel Aviv, Moscow and Washington – the last issuing a $1bn lawsuit threat – joining in the kicking.
Davie was responsible for other things that had gone wrong at the BBC. He was not and never had been a news man. He was marketing; he was management. The trouble was, he was also “editor-in-chief”, and the BBC is nothing – not Traitors, not Strictly, not Doctor Who – before it is, at heart and soul, a news and current affairs organisation. There are signs the management knew this. They launched BBC Verify as a high-minded attempt to combat misinformation in 2023. As a fact-checker, it is widely trusted.
But across the output, coverage has in recent years been infected with a flabbiness, a virtue-signalling desperation and a weakness for celebrity pap over genuinely important news. An aggressively journalism-focused boss would not have allowed this. It is a far bigger problem than perceived left-wing bias.
Bias? All institutions, from the New Statesman to the Church of England, are biased in their own interest and affected by who they recruit. The BBC, as a public sector organisation, based in multicultural central London, employing graduates interested in politics and likely to have imbibed liberal views, is consequently likely to have an inbuilt liberal bias. I once said as much to an internal BBC meeting and was given a tongue-lashing by a news executive afterwards for disloyalty.
My point had been that it is juvenile to pretend there is no institutional bias. Only by acknowledging one’s own bias and leaning hard against it can a journalistic outfit like the BBC successfully respond. Young BBC reporters have to try to think themselves into the minds of others, whether conservative-leaning elderly licence-payers, or indeed British Muslims, Jews, Sikhs or Christians.
There is another problem lurking in that last sentence, which we will come back to. But outsiders who claim that Davie somehow couldn’t be bothered with impartiality have clearly never had to sit through the deeply patronising impartiality seminars he insisted on. Rather, the constant battering of criticism from all sides has produced a kind of journalistic PTSD – a mumbling nervousness about clear assertions, even of the bleeding obvious – that helped drive some of us who were there mildly tonto. (By the end, I felt that I was self-censoring in pub conversations with friends and family, which was not why I had come to journalism in the first place.)
Davie is not a friend of mine, and I did not believe he was a perfect director general. He had a kind of chin-out swagger – I mean that in terms of character – which meant he was slow to apologise, fatally so in the case of the Trump mis-editing. Anyone who has spent hours in edit suites, trying to get the most impact, the biggest punch, from raw footage will understand how that edit happened. But anyone who has done that will also understand how unacceptable it was to splice two comments Trump made, 50 minutes apart, ahead of the 6 January riots. There should always be a flash, a cutaway, or an explanation when an edit has been made that in any sense changes meaning. It wasn’t “a mistake”. The only mistake was not to see it early and apologise openly.
Davie was not a keen apologiser. He could be arrogant around politicians. But if anyone thinks the problems are fundamentally about him, or the ex-ITN executives Deborah Turness (who has gone with him) and Jonathan Munro (who hasn’t), then they know nothing.
My first direct boss at the BBC was Mark Damazer, then deputy director of BBC News. He would stride around asking polite but persistent questions: “So, who are you calling next?” It’s the kind of thing that happens in the newsroom of any decent newspaper – not that there are many of those left – and the BBC has to get back to it as soon as possible. There needs to be hands-on management of current affairs, and fewer meetings in which executives manoeuvre delicately around one another, thinking of their next promotion.
But apart from recent scandals, let’s recall previous Panorama battles with Conservative governments, notably “Maggie’s Militant Tendency”, in 1984; or the notorious interview with Diana by Martin Bashir, also Panorama, in 1995; or the persistent belief within the Thatcher government that the BBC was biased against British interests in Northern Ireland and the Falklands. Is the Trump editing scandal really more damaging than those? How does the Croxall eye-roll compare to Jimmy Savile or Huw Edwards? Are we losing perspective?
There are parallels in the 1987 ousting of Alasdair Milne as director general. Unlike Davie, he was a BBC lifer and current affairs producer who rose to the top. Journalistically, he was ambitious, growing the range of satire, culture and history. But like Davie, he fell out with a critical conservative press, led by the Murdoch papers and the Daily Mail. He too struggled to find an alternative to the licence fee. His exit was also brutally quick.
Thatcher saw Milne as a metropolitan softy. Things were done differently in those days. The then home secretary phoned Marmaduke Hussey, the managing editor of Times Newspapers. According to Hussey’s memoirs, he said: “Oh, Dukie, it’s Douglas Hurd here, with a very odd question to ask you. Would you like to be chairman of the BBC?” Hussey agreed, and moved against Milne, who was summoned into the chairman’s office. Milne recalled: “Hussey’s lip trembled as he said, ‘I’m afraid this is going to be a very unpleasant interview. We want you to leave immediately. It’s a unanimous decision of the board.’”
At the time, it was thought this marked the end of BBC independence. Lord Hussey, as he became, served a decade as chairman and soon brought in John Birt – the human organogram with a “mission to explain”. Many loathed Birt, but under him the BBC evolved and survived, launching its internet service. Birt later became an adviser to Tony Blair.
You could argue, therefore, that the BBC has always endured greater rifts and has always survived – from the Tories through to the row with Blair over the death of David Kelly in the wake of the invasion of Iraq, and the subsequent Hutton Inquiry. As political editor of the BBC at the time, I can vividly remember the earthquakes passing through our newsroom and the bitter arguments between journalists. At a crucial moment, I called the chairman, Gavyn Davies, who made it clear he felt he’d have to resign as well. I went straight on to live news and said so – regrettably, fractionally before he had finally decided.
Has it always been this way? Once again, the BBC is facing a ferocious newspaper campaign. It is no reflection on the skill of individual journalists to say the organisations attacking it would benefit from its being reduced to a non-competitor, or from its demolition.
From the origins of the BBC in the 1920s, newspapers have seen it as encroaching on their business and tried to limit it. At the beginning, they didn’t want it to report news at all. And, through much of the postwar period, this was also a battle between left and right, with the right defending its near monopoly in printed news. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.
Today, the BBC is seen as too trendy, too metropolitan and too woke. Once again the immediate point of contention is life and death. In the 1980s, it was the war in Northern Ireland or the war in the Falklands. Later, it was the one in Iraq. Today, the pith of the recent Prescott Inquiry into bias is about the war in Gaza. This has divided British opinion so bitterly and deeply that the BBC was always going to have a problem with its reporting.
It is as if, when we have an argument to have with ourselves, we turn it into an argument about the BBC. The editing of Trump’s speech is an example. Behind it is the anxiety-inducing question of how Britain deals with the president – do we oppose him and risk angering him, or cosy up and get from him what we can? Had the editing misrepresented any other leader, you would never have heard about it.
The divided-audience problem spreads well beyond Gaza. We have been just as divided about Brexit, about our imperial history, and about gender. The BBC has always seen itself as the nation’s town square – a reasonable and moderate space in which Britain can discuss anything with itself. But what if we no longer want a moderate platform? What if the age of reasonable, modulated, nuanced conversation is long gone?
That is a horrible thought. It takes us back to the idea that the BBC may be not a platform but our guardrail against digital and political chaos. But, whatever metaphor you choose, what happened this autumn is not business as usual. It’s not an average crisis.
For starters, the international aspect can’t be ignored. If Trump proceeds with a lawsuit in Florida, his home state, the costs of defending it will be astronomical: if the BBC lost, what would a progressive government do? Underwrite the bill? Plead with Trump to desist? A pre-emptive grovel seems sensible but there’s no part of this that is anything but grim.
And it all takes place at a time of more general political despair, when the postwar British establishment is crumbling and when the media landscape is almost unrecognisable. Without radical improvement, the NHS as we know it may vanish into a patchwork of health insurance schemes. The Windsors are a shrunken lot, fighting for both respect and relevance: the monarchy is more questioned than ever, not only by the New Statesman.
If Reform becomes the next government it is unlikely the BBC’s charter will be renewed. Nigel Farage has called for a new private sector leader for the BBC and warned that it is the organisation’s “last chance. If they don’t get this right, there will be vast numbers of people refusing to pay the licence fee.”
We must assume that Farage would go further, copy Trump and try to shape a more comfortable media environment for himself, dominated by conservative broadcast platforms as well as social media. Britain would become more like the US, with GB News our new normal – even, perhaps, the new middle ground. For a country as divided as this one, the loss of the BBC would be a shock from which there would be no going back.
It would be a cultural shock as well as a political one. The American streamers are digging deep into British culture. Indeed, if the BBC board did go for a non-journalist, the best candidate might well be Anne Mensah of Netflix, and formerly of Sky UK, perhaps the most creative commissioner at the moment. But remember – the US streamers are giving us their view of us, not our view. For how long can a national culture survive if it is known to its natives only through alien eyes?
Let us return to where we started. A hero is needed. The job of director general is virtually impossible. An honest opening statement in any interview would begin like this: “The good news is that we will pay you very well. You will have many interesting meetings and a higher profile than you can well imagine. The less good news is that everyone will hate you, and you’ll be booted out in disgrace.”
I spoke to the obvious candidates. They laugh nervously. One said he’d just been to the dentist and would prefer to spend the next few years there. Others said they couldn’t face the pressure. But, remarkably, there are tough and experienced journalists out there who want to have a go. It’s a job bigger than journalism, bigger than almost anything in politics. Britain needs the BBC, and a better BBC than the one we have. It’s step-up time.
[Further reading: The BBC is worth fighting for]
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This article appears in the 13 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, What Keir won't hear