The Huw Edwards affair has been a catastrophe for the BBC. At its core are the victims of abuse – the unknown children who were involved in the images Edwards has admitted to viewing. And it is about Edwards himself – a formidable journalist brought down by human failing. But the consequences for the BBC as the national broadcaster will be serious and long-lasting.
It may seem that we have been here before. The multiple and more serious crimes of Jimmy Savile will never be erased from the BBC’s history, and the corporation is seldom far from a crisis. Martin Bashir and the interview with the Princess of Wales; Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand turning entertainment into excruciating intrusion; the false allegations against Alistair McAlpine – each time with a director-general and senior executive under siege and at risk of being toppled. But where the Edwards affair is so uniquely damaging is that it sits at the very heart of the BBC News operation. At a stroke, the archive of recent national events – from the wedding of Prince Harry to the Coronation, with the 2019 general election along the way – will forever be seen through the prism of the Edwards scandal.
The BBC will say that its crises are exacerbated by its political critics and commercial rivals. They are right. There are hostile forces besieging Broadcasting House. But the question cannot be avoided: why does this keep happening here, and why is the BBC once again making global headlines for all the wrong reasons?
It may be that the Edwards disaster was unforeseeable. The presenter of the Queen’s funeral accessing the most serious child abuse images would never have been on the corporate risk register, and even those of us who employed Edwards and were his personal friends had no sense of the turmoil that was inside him.
It is therefore wrong to judge Tim Davie, the BBC director-general, too harshly on his handling of the fallout. First in July 2023 Davie had to deal with a murky issue that was arguably about an individual’s private life, when the Sun revealed that Edwards had paid a vulnerable young person £35,000 for explicit images. (The man, now 21, has since claimed he was “groomed” by Edwards.)
Davie had to consider the BBC’s duty of care to an employee who was signed off sick. Then, in November 2023, as was revealed in recent days, Davie found out from the police that Edwards had been arrested but he was required to treat the matter with the highest level of confidentiality. With hindsight, it would have been much better for all involved if Edwards had stopped being paid at that point – but I can see why the lawyers may have taken a different view.
Lisa Nandy, the new Labour Culture Secretary, has weighed in, saying Edwards should return the salary (as much as £200,000) he was paid after he had been arrested and before he left the BBC in April 2024. She summoned Davie on 1 August to explain himself. She is reported to have asked to see the BBC’s legal advice. However, Tina Stowell – a former BBC employee who now chairs the Lords Communications Committee – was right to ask on Twitter: “Where was the [BBC] board in all this?” Stowell added: “It’s easy to make a bad situation worse if the distinctive roles and responsibilities of the director-general, BBC chairman and the secretary of state aren’t upheld.”
In other words, the government has a tightrope to walk between holding the BBC accountable and intervening as if it were its managers.
But change is necessary. First, the most common failing in all these scandals is the top management not knowing what was happening on the shop floor. In the Edwards case, it seems as if allegations of inappropriate behaviour by him towards staff – such as uncomfortably flirtatious messages – never reached a threshold of management action. We have also learned of two external complaints: the first from a woman about Edwards’ behaviour in 2021, and the second (which the BBC admits it mishandled) in 2023 from the family of the vulnerable young man. If the processes had worked properly, it should have given BBC leaders considerable doubt about Edwards’ role as its flagship news presenter long before he was found guilty of serious criminal behaviour.
I can speak from personal experience – during the meltdowns of the early 2000s, the most common handicap for management was not that we “knew” about all the imbroglios and covered them up, but that we were scrambling to find out what had happened after allegations had been splashed in the newspapers. The management in 2012 had no knowledge about the scale and nature of Savile’s crimes. A few years earlier, and more prosaically, we did not know that distorting premium-rate phone line competitions was common practice in entertainment. The BBC is at times an impermeable and inflexible bureaucracy, in which information does not flow as it should.
The BBC compounds this problem by an extreme defensiveness in its public statements. There were no live interviews with managers on the BBC’s airwaves in the entire week that the Edwards court appearance happened. Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy described it as “utterly bizarre that this public organisation that we all have a stake in is refusing to face questions on its behaviour”. It is similarly strange that not a single manager (with the exception of Davie at the time of the BBC’s annual report in July) has addressed publicly the recent misconduct concerns about Strictly Come Dancing. If the corporation truly wants to be an accountable organisation, it needs its senior leaders to engage consistently with the public in the way that it expects from everyone else.
The next crisis could be a KC’s report into what the BBC knew about allegations against the former Radio 1 DJ Tim Westwood, who has been accused of predatory and unwanted sexual behaviour over many years (which he denies). The report has so far cost more than £3m and is running 18 months late. In rightly accepting accountability for its employees’ behaviour (in an organisation that is huge in its ambitions and its staff numbers) the BBC should be more open about the limits of what is possible to manage. But it must also set out the change that it believes it can implement.
Tim Davie should be given a chance to put things right at the BBC. The failings are those of others, and the corporate culture has been created over decades. But the proliferation of crises – and the prolonged aftershocks from the Edwards affair – means that action now is unavoidable. Davie’s leadership and that of the BBC board will be tested as never before.
[See also: The teenage Messiah is no more]
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