There is a deep sense of shock at the BBC over the events of the past 24 hours, but also of anger. “Bewildered fury,” is how one insider described the mood following the resignation of director general Tim Davie and BBC News CEO Deborah Turness.
For some, that rage appears to be driven by a sense of injustice that the UK national broadcaster has been the victim of a right-wing plot. Deadline has spoken to several insiders in recent hours, and a good number, including senior figures, lined up to propagate the “coup” theory.
The idea has come up in internal BBC News meetings and been ventilated on BBC airwaves by friends of the corporation like David Yelland, once a key figure in the Murdoch empire and now a communications specialist with his own BBC podcast.
Pressed for detail, many were vague, but one name is never far from people’s lips: Robbie Gibb. A former BBC journalist, Gibb spent time on the other side of the aisle as press secretary to Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May before being appointed to the BBC board by Tory ministers in 2021.
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Gibb has also served on the BBC board’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, where he worked alongside external advisor Michael Prescott. Prescott penned the excoriating memo that is ground zero for this crisis. He exposed the botched Donald Trump edit and skewered the BBC’s perceived anti-Israel and pro-trans rights bias.
The argument goes that, from his seat on the Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, Gibb orchestrated the content reviews that helped inform Prescott’s memo. These reviews were led by David Grossman, who overlapped with Gibb on BBC show Newsnight in the noughties and acted as an advisor to the Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee.
Prescott’s document made its way into the hands of The Daily Telegraph, a newspaper that is no friend to the BBC, prompting days of ugly headlines, social media rage, and political attacks, not least from Trump’s White House. Among those agitating for Davie’s head was Boris Johnson, the former British PM who ultimately signed off on Gibb’s appointment to the BBC board.
The BBC’s paralysis in responding to Prescott’s conclusions last week has only fuelled the conspiracy. Sources said Turness, the BBC News chief, was blocked by the board from making a statement, a turn of events that is said to have left her furious.
Gibb is a divisive figure at the BBC, who is unafraid of voicing his views on output and challenging what he considers to be liberal groupthink. Many think he oversteps the boundaries of a traditional board member, but others believe he has every right to challenge content makers. Is it really plausible that he contrived to sow chaos and bring down the director general?
“This is a coup, the board has been captured,” was the answer of one well-placed insider. Others were more circumspect, but still pointed the finger: “I think the word ‘coup’ is a bit strong, to be honest. It was an organized attempt to intimidate — [it] probably went further than even they imagined.”
A friend of Gibb’s said this idea is preposterous. “The allegation that there is a conspiracy is absolute nonsense. Just to reiterate, the bulk of the Prescott report is based on the analysis and research of David Grossman, not Michael Prescott,” the source said. Gibb’s allies added that he did not want Davie to resign, and he remains a supporter of the BBC and its license fee funding model.
Others think that talk of a coup only reinforces the notion that the BBC is not listening to critics who complain about its institutional bias. “We’ve got to stop this right-wing plot talk — it plays into their hands when we take on a victim stance,” said one presenter.
There is now broad agreement that Panorama’s edit of Trump’s January 6 speech was a mistake, but it has taken the BBC 11 months to admit it was an error. Indeed, when the Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee was first alerted to concerns about the Panorama film in January, and then again in May, BBC executives defended the change made to the U.S. president’s Capitol speech.
“There is a blindness to this stuff,” was how a senior BBC News presenter put it. Another source said the Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee became a “bloodsport,” pitting advisors against executives in a way that has not led to constructive outcomes. Neither side wanted Davie to quit, but that is where the BBC has ended up. Trump, meanwhile, is threatening a $1B lawsuit.
One seasoned BBC newsroom figure summed up the situation like this: “Executives made enough mistakes you could argue they fell over from shooting themselves in the foot too often. [A coup] is a nice narrative in the absence of facts.”