The BBC is back at the centre of an all too familiar drama: fighting a sex-and-power scandal involving a star presenter. The Beeb announced on 22 August that Jermaine Jenas, host of The One Show and a Match of the Day pundit who has been enjoying £190k a year of licence fee funds, had sent inappropriate messages to two junior members of staff and had been sacked.
The story was broken by the Sun, which pipped the Mail to the post. Embarrassingly, the Sun also post-pipped the BBC’s director of sport, Alex Kay-Jelski, who belatedly bashed out an all-staff message saying Jenas had gone. But otherwise, it seems on this occasion the BBC has got things right. An HR inquiry had been ongoing for weeks, and the women involved had handed over the unwanted messages. In what must have been an excruciating Zoom meeting, the offending texts were read to the married father of four. Jenas’s agents, M&C Saatchi Merlin, instantly dropped him. In showbiz, it’s a bad sign when the people who earn 20 per cent every time you open your mouth won’t help you do so in self-defence.
Yet every perpetrator is a victim these days, as Jenas illustrated when he came out with a dazzling non-apology apology. His first reaction to a reporter from News UK-owned TalkSport (which Jenas has worked for) was: “I am not happy about it… I’m going to have to let the lawyers deal with it. You know there’s two sides to every story.”
Presumably lawyers dealt with it by telling him to own up to it, as the next day Jenas sat down with the Sun for a classic mea culpa: “I have let myself down, my family, friends and colleagues down…” and so on. But staying on script is harder without an autocue, and soon he was qualifying: “I did nothing illegal – these were inappropriate messages between two consenting adults.”
Soon the, er, “apology” from the usually ennui-laden Jenas was positively animated. “From a process point of view from the BBC, it’s shocking,” he said. He was cross bosses hadn’t let him contact the women to say sorry, and didn’t want to be “the fall guy” for BBC’s failings over Huw Edwards and Strictly Come Dancing. Which brings us to the crux of it all. Jenas is (perhaps understandably) sore that after making a hash of every scandal that comes its way, the BBC has dealt with a case swiftly and soundly for the first time. There were terrible failures in tackling the Jimmy Savile and Martin Bashir scandals, and allegations of bullying on Strictly continue. There was the moral failure of continuing to pay Edwards after his arrest for making indecent images of children.
Jenas’s case has been dealt with. He did the wrong thing – morally and by BBC standards. An on-air presenter with power and prestige cannot send sexual messages to women with less power, patronage and pay. Maybe the BBC is finally starting to emerge from its bureaucratic inertia and cautiousness to deal robustly with those living off licence fee payers’ largesse.
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There is disquiet within Labour at the decision to axe winter fuel payments to ten million pensioners. The loss of £100-£300 a year comes as the energy price cap is hiked by an average of 10 per cent. But if pensioners, Age UK, Tories and Labour backbenchers are angry, the newspaper front pages are incandescent. “It’s a betrayal!” screeched the Daily Express. “Pensioners’ £500 energy bill hike after Labour cuts”, was the Mail’s take (adding fuel allowance to average bill increases to hit that number). The Times said: “Some pensioners will face a choice… between fuel and food.” The Sun, which backed Labour at the election, agreed: “Some will now have to choose between heating and eating.”
There is no doubt the cut is causing real fear for those living just above eligibility for pension tax credit. But did Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer consider the fear it would cause the print media? Almost a third of all newspaper readers in the UK are over 60. Among Telegraph readers, it’s 38 per cent. The average Daily Mail print reader is 56. Readers are increasingly pensioners, or will soon be. And with the Sun now costing £1, the Express £1.60 and the Times £2.80, titles’ owners won’t want pensioners making tough decisions between heating, eating – and reading.
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First the columnist and TV star Jeremy Clarkson took up farming. Now he has transformed, Mr Benn-style, into a pub landlord. Queues gathered on 23 August for the opening of his Farmer’s Dog bar near Burford in Oxfordshire. Clarkson is the most complained-about writer in the history of the news standards body Ipso for a vile column on Meghan Markle, and Top Gear was regularly at the centre of BBC controversies. But Clarkson’s Farm has become the most-watched original show on Prime Video in the UK and apparently boosted applications to study farming by 30 per cent. Perhaps he’ll engender similar enthusiasm for the pub industry and help reverse closures, now at about two a day.
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Public fascination with the sinking of the Bayesian luxury yacht continues. The deaths of the billionaire Mike Lynch, his daughter Hannah, 18, and five others has dominated the media since their boat sank near Sicily more than a week ago. More than 20 people have died trying to cross the Channel in small boats this year.
Alison Phillips was editor of the Daily Mirror 2018-24
[See also: The press doesn’t understand the public]
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This article appears in the 28 Aug 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Trump in turmoil