Tim Davie is facing possibly the biggest crisis of his crisis-strewn stint as the BBC’s director general after one of the corporation’s prominent male television presenters was suspended.
How Davie handles the crisis – and whether he survives it – could define his tenure at the helm of the broadcaster and shape the BBC’s future.
Running the BBC is like trying to steer an oil tanker through a narrow strait, while blindfolded, with the controls jammed. Add in the knowledge that there is always a giant storm somewhere on the horizon that will knock you off course for weeks and it is one of the most challenging management jobs in British media.
It requires a calm head, clear direction and a fair dose of luck. Yet Davie is still nursing his self-inflicted wounds over the Gary Lineker affair, when the director general attempted to assert his power by suspending the Match of the Day presenter for an apparent breach of the BBC’s impartiality guidelines, only to find himself forced to back down in the face of a strike by BBC presenters.
Since then, sources at the corporation suggest that he has been on the back foot, keen to avoid confrontation and major clashes over policy that could create a new scandal. Instead, thanks to the alleged actions of one presenter, he finds himself in the middle of his biggest mess yet after being battered by a storm that he did not see coming.
The BBC presenter – who has not been named by media outlets, partly out of concern for privacy law – was suspended by the broadcaster on Sunday. The presenter allegedly sent £35,000 to a young person over three years in return for explicit images and videos. The young person’s mother claims that her child was only 17 when they began communicating with the BBC presenter – raising the possibility that any pictures sent at that age could count as child sexual abuse images.
The issue for Davie is that the mother says she took her story to the media only after the BBC failed to act on a complaint that she sent directly to the corporation in mid-May. She suggested that the BBC was scared to suspend the high-profile presenter and gave her a number that did not work.
It is already inevitable that parliament and other organisations will launch investigations into the BBC’s handling of her complaint. They are likely to focus on why it took almost two months between the mother’s initial complaint and the presenter’s suspension when the Sun put the story on its front page.
Sources at the BBC suggest there was a substantial difference between the complaint filed in May and the more severe allegations put to the BBC by the Sun last week. But Davie, already struggling to convince staff that they can confidently blow the whistle on wrongdoing, will have to prove it was not fear of negative publicity that led to the change in the BBC’s approach.
The BBC’s governing board also lacks an experienced chair to provide support, after Richard Sharp resigned last month over his own scandal. In Sharp’s place is the interim chair, Prof Dame Elan Closs Stephens, a Welsh academic who has only been in the job for a fortnight and does not have the same political connections as her predecessor.
To make matters worse for Davie, the BBC’s annual report – containing details of pay deals for its biggest stars – is due on Tuesday, meaning that he will have to be subject to questioning from journalists and asked to justify the remuneration of many of the BBC’s biggest stars.
The failure to name the presenter means that public interest in the story will remain enormous. Politicians are demanding answers. Staff are wondering whether they were sufficiently protected at work. The BBC has plenty of experience of scandals, but even old hands are shocked by the allegations against the presenter. One veteran employee compared it to the crisis in 2004 over the BBC’s reporting on the Iraq war. “This is Hutton on crystal meth,” they said.
