A right-wing coup at the BBC? Don’t make me laugh

Have you heard? There’s been a right-wing coup at the BBC. Apparently, a ‘cabal’ of ‘populists’ has just succeeded in ousting director-general Tim Davie and CEO of news and current affairs Deborah Turness. That, remarkably, is the high-status take following the shock resignations of Davie and Turness last night, following the outrageous, flagrant examples not simply of BBC bias, but of it pushing flat-out misinformation, detailed in an internal memo leaked to the Telegraph.

To call this a misreading of the situation is generous. It’s totally demented. BBC Panorama was caught out doctoring footage of Donald Trump’s ‘January 6’ speech, stitching together two bits, an hour apart, to make it appear as if he had explicitly incited the mob that later attacked the Capitol on that grim day in 2021. Unsurprisingly, the White House has taken a dim view of this – as has the British government. And yet our national, ‘impartial’ broadcaster being found to have spread lies about a politician – who we all know is loathed by those who work there – is being treated as if it’s a big fat nothing cooked up by a blood-scenting right.

It would be bad enough if the usual suspects were simply ranting – tinfoil hat at a jaunty angle – into their X feeds, like Belsize Park’s answer to Alex Jones. But they were also all over the BBC this morning. Former Murdoch newspaper man turned BBC podcaster David Yelland was on Today, airing his conspiracy theory that a ‘cabal of toxic plotters with links to the BBC board’ had ‘designed and executed a coup’, as he had put it on social media. When pressed, he couldn’t present a scrap of proof for this. But this claim was revisited time and again throughout the show.

Presenter Nick Robinson seems to think there’s something in it, saying: ‘It’s clear that there is a genuine concern about editorial standards and mistakes. There is also a political campaign by people who want to destroy the organisation… Both things are happening at the same time.’ That’s BBC ‘impartiality’ for you. Nod to the ‘concerns’ while slyly suggesting they’re bullshit.

Well, they’re not bullshit. I know it. You know it. Deep down, I’m sure Nick knows it. He certainly would if he bothered to read that extensive memo that called this on, written by Michael Prescott before he left his role as an independent external adviser to the BBC’s editorial standards committee in June. It doesn’t raise ‘concerns’ about editorial bias, it details devastating evidence of it. What is being dismissed as ‘one bad edit’ is actually a litany of untruths and laundered propaganda, and a BBC hierarchy that is refusing to accept anything is wrong.

The Trump stuff isn’t the half of it. BBC Arabic has been giving hundreds of on-air appearances to anti-Semites, including a man who once suggested Jews should be burned ‘as Hitler did’. It also routinely promotes the Hamas line on events and ignores the plight of the Israeli hostages. Following a review of five months’ worth of BBC Gaza coverage, it was found that ‘the BBC’s main news website posted 19 separate stories about the hostages taken by Hamas on the day of its terror attack. On BBC Arabic there were none.’ Then there’s BBC News’s ‘specialist LGBTQ desk’, which ‘decline[s] to cover any story raising difficult questions about the trans debate’. And do you get those BBC ‘push notifications’ on your phone, relaying the breaking news? In September 2023, out of 219 notifications sent, ‘just four were about the issues of illegal migrants and asylum seekers’, one of the defining political issues of our time. And three of them were about the ‘mistreatment of migrants’. For perspective, 12 notifications were sent out about Russell Brand.

I know what you’re thinking… BBC Verify must be livid. How could the celebrated Marianna Spring and her colleagues at the Beeb’s mini Ministry of Truth miss so much material right there under their noses? Well, it turns out they were part of the problem, too. One of BBC Verify’s ‘first flagship reports’, which claimed that areas with a high number of ethnic minorities paid more in car insurance, an ‘ethnic penalty’, eventually had to be taken down because it drew on ‘old and unsuitable data’ that could not establish causation. So the BBC’s anti-misinfo unit published misinfo. Of course it did.

That heads have rolled is hardly surprising. But still the bunker mentality remains unshakeable. ‘In public life leaders need to be fully accountable, and that is why I am stepping down’, said Turness in her resignation statement. There was a big but coming. ‘While mistakes have been made, I want to be absolutely clear recent allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong.’ So she resigned for presiding over rampant bias that isn’t actually there. I don’t even doubt her sincerity. Clearly, bias and what you might call ‘due partiality’ is now the water BBC higher-ups swim in. They don’t even know they’re doing it anymore.

Deny it she well might, but the evidence of wrongdoing is now overwhelming. Meanwhile, proof that some shady ‘cabal’ is actually what forced out Davie and Turness is unsurprisingly thin on the ground. Yelland and his ilk merely point to the hidden hand of Robbie Gibb, the former Tory communications chief and GB News executive, who was appointed to the BBC board by Boris Johnson. Alan Rusbridger, former editor-in-chief of the Guardian, points out that Michael Prescott, who wrote the leaked memo, is friendly with Gibb, as if that discredits its meticulous findings. Indeed, the memo would suggest that if there was a right-wing coup at the BBC it was the most ineffectual in history, less storming the post office and more quietly joining the queue while huffing a bit. The staffers certainly don’t seem to have noticed the new right-wing regime.

The BBC has not been brought low by Donald Trump or Nigel Farage or the apparently fearsome, Machiavellian genius of Robbie Gibb. It has been brought low by its decades-long drift away from its supposed principles, from seeking to inform the people to seeking to correct them. The populist revolts of 2016 only convinced an institution that had long nursed a softer metro-liberal bias that it needed to start saying the quiet parts out loud. That the idiot voters had got it so wrong they desperately needed much firmer instruction. Thus, the establishment panic about lies and misinformation gave birth to a whole new era of establishment lies and misinformation. It’s almost funny. A public broadcaster against the public. The reckoning, surely, starts now.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater