Albert Einstein wasn’t thinking about the BBC when he defined insanity as ‘doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result’, but he could have been. The BBC’s latest scandal, involving its former star presenter Huw Edwards, has followed a remarkably similar trajectory to the last two marmalade droppers that embroiled the Corporation.
So will the BBC finally learn its lesson?
The way the BBC dealt with Huw Edwards – once the embodiment of BBC culture and values but now a disgraced sex offender who admitted making indecent images of children – has strong echoes of the Jimmy Savile and Martin Bashir scandals. In both those cases, like this one, instead of acting swiftly and decisively, the BBC chose to obstruct, delay and (ironically) try to protect the brand.
The circumstances of those scandals are well known but worth repeating. Had BBC management heeded Newsnight producer Meirion Jones’s warning in 2011 that ‘substantial damage’ would be done to the BBC’s reputation if they shelved his report into Savile’s crimes, they could have avoided a world of pain.
Yes, there would have been outrage that the BBC let him get away with it for so long. But then so did the NHS, the Catholic Church and the Tory government. Once the BBC effectively said ‘nothing to see here’, and nixed the report, though, there was no one else to blame but the Beeb. Had the BBC run the story and grovelled, things would have been bad, but not nearly as awful as they turned out when the story blew up. End result: destroyed careers and a witheringly critical public inquiry.
Ditto Martin Bashir. The BBC knew that its rogue reporter had commissioned fake bank statements to secure his 1995 Panorama interview with Princess Diana but chose instead to cover up his behaviour. End result: destroyed careers and a witheringly critical public inquiry.
Back to the present. Having worked on and off for the Corporation for 40 years and written plays about Savile and Bashir, I expected it to learn from those mistakes. But when the Sun broke its story about Edwards in July last year, it was more of the same.
The BBC did, admittedly, get it right initially. After the parents of a young man complained to the Sun about Edwards paying thousands of pounds for ‘sordid images’, the BBC took him off air and launched an inquiry. But then the BBC adopted its usual approach: it dragged its feet. Instead of sacking Edwards last summer – or, indeed, in November, when it knew he had been arrested over the most serious category of indecent images of children – it refused to let him go. Instead, the BBC continued to pay Edwards. It even handed him a £40,000 pay rise in the last financial year, despite him being off air for most of it.
If the BBC had acted sooner, it could have avoided the serious, deserved flak it got. There would have been an outcry, of course. But the BBC could have explained that newspresenters’ careers are governed by one rule only: that they should be in private what they appear to be in public. If your £465,000 salary and reputation stems from being our most trusted, decent and upstanding newsreader, you cannot also be someone who harasses young men on social media for pictures. Yes, Edwards would probably have gone to an employment tribunal if he’d been sacked. But once discovery got going, and texts and pictures came to light, it would have been game over.
To be fair, the BBC’s room for manoeuvre was limited by Edwards’ well-documented history of depression. But you can dispense with someone’s services compassionately and terminate a contract but still fulfil your duty of care, indefinitely, afterwards.
The other uncanny similarity between then and now was the shoot-the-messenger attitude. It was the Mail on Sunday who first trumpeted Bashir’s wrongdoing in 1996. But the Corporation’s (non) response was fuelled by the belief that the MoS was ‘just’ a tabloid – a filthy tabloid for goodness sake! – with an anti-BBC agenda. It was no different this time round. The BBC’s former North America editor Jon Sopel, who now co-presents the podcast The News Agents, spoke for many when he said: ‘I don’t know what went on at the Sun. But it seemed to me they had a slightly half cooked story they decided to go with…it was nonsense.’
Oh dear. The only thing the Sun got wrong, arguably, was that it under reported the story. They didn’t even identify Edwards initially – his wife did, days later. And they also pulled their punches on the gruesome details of what had happened.
So, will the BBC finally learn its lesson? Will the BBC’s director-general Tim Davie, and the Corporation’s army of lawyers, HR and PR people see where they went wrong? I wouldn’t bet on it.
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