Lisa Nandy did not seem to want to be in the Commons chamber today. One can hardly blame her – the row over bias at the BBC that has seen the departures (first broken by the New Statesman) of director general Tim Davie and CEO of BBC News Deborah Turness, not to mention the threat of a $1bn lawsuit from Donald Trump, is the last thing a government lurching from crisis to crisis needs on its plate.
On a subject that gets to the heart of Britain’s national psyche, it fell to the culture secretary to take the heat out of the debate. Which Nandy attempted to do by being as uncontroversial as possible.
It’s not that Nandy failed to make clear her support for Britain’s national broadcaster. She began by pointing out that the BBC is the most trusted sources of news in this country and in many places across the world – something she repeated multiple times over the 80-minute session. It has, she said, “faced criticism from all sides for its coverage of highly contentious and contested issues, and accused of giving too much airtime to particular parties, and for giving them too little”. At one point she called the World Service “a light on the hill”, referring to the BBC as a whole as “a national institution that belongs to us all” that “stands apart” from other media at a time of polarisation and the blurring of fact and opinion.
It was a robust defence. But at the same time, Nandy did not underplay the seriousness of the criticisms that have emerged over the past week: of coverage that fails to meet the BBC’s own editorial guidelines, of reluctance to cover certain stories, of specific issues with the BBC Arabic service, susceptibility to group think, and the editing by Panorama of Trump’s speech on the day of the January 6 Capitol riots. She thanked both Davie and Turness for their service and repeatedly praised the work of BBC journalists, while simultaneously making clear the BBC was facing challenges “of its own making”.
If all that makes it sound like Nandy was struggling to decide on which side of the fence she was on, it’s because she was. Or rather, her line was simultaneously that it is right for the BBC to face up to the criticism that is bombarding it and that it must improve, and also that it must be defended at all costs.
Nandy’s determination not to say anything that could be interpreted as committing news was epitomised by her reluctance again and again to offer answers on the more contentious questions. She refused point blank to comment on the potential Trump lawsuit no matter how many times she was asked (a tactic also taken by the PM’s spokesperson earlier today), at one point).
Nor would she be drawn on Robbie Gibb, the BBC board member (and former head of comms for Theresa May) believed by some on the left to have exacerbated the latest drama as part of an effort to undermine the national broadcaster. A host of MPs from the Labour, Lib Dem and Green benches stood up to call for Gibb’s head on a platter. Particular highlights included Sarah Owen lambasting MPs who “cosplay being journalists on RT and GB News” and stressing “the principle of keeping our public broadcaster free from political interference” by sacking “former spin doctor Robbie Gibb”, and Anneliese Midgley who simply asked “Robbie Gibb: faithful or traitor?”
Nandy’s line was that her hands were tied because there was a “strict legal threshold” for removing directors. This did not stop the questions (indeed, a Lib Dem point of order at the end suggested Nandy isn’t quite as powerless as she made out), but the culture secretary refused to budge. Of course, she didn’t she offer any defence of Gibb either. (It was up to Tory veteran Julian Lewis to insist that, while he “would fight in the last ditch” to prevent the BBC ceasing to exist, “this crisis has nothing to do with Robbie Gibb”.) Instead, she took the standard Keir Starmer line that it isn’t for the government to get involved, and that she couldn’t even if she wanted to.
As Tory after Tory – including not just shadow culture secretary Nigel Huddleston but two of Nandy’s predecessors, Oliver Dowden and John Whittingdale – stepped up to stress the severity of the charges laid against the BBC, Nandy’s intonation never changed. Viewers will have lost count of the number of times she said she agreed with whatever had been asked, even if it seemed to directly contradict something else she had already said she agreed with. Towards the end of the session, as even the MPs bobbing up and down to ask questions appeared to be flagging, she thanked MPs saying “it is a credit to this House that we can have a sensitive and measured debate”.
Some of that sensitivity and measure may have been due to the fact that there was not a single Reform MP in chamber throughout. Lee Anderson, who had been there half an hour previously to contribute to the grilling of David Lammy over mistaken prisoner releases, had vanished to hotfoot it to the GB News studio, where he appeared (cosplaying a journalist, as Sarah Owen would have put it) as Nandy was speaking to call her statement “astonishing”. Of Nigel Farage there was no sign at all, except in a question about him appearing on BBC Question Time more often than he’s appeared in his own constituency.
The point it seemed Nandy most wanted to emphasise was the difference between “raising serious concerns” and “launching a sustained attack on the institution itself”. The trouble the government has is that many staunch BBC defenders (notably including some on the Labour benches) seem to believe that anyone doing the former is actually guilty of the latter. At the same time, the BBC does have genuine enemies on the right who despise its existence as a matter of principle (and commercial advantage) and want it damaged beyond repair. By failing to uphold its own standards it has, as former Tory minister Damian Hinds pointed out, handed “ammunition” to its fiercest critics – and to those who do not have faith in the “MSM” at all. That’s the sort of damage no intervention from a government minister can undo.
[Further reading: Nick Robinson for BBC director general?]
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