One man is responsible for bringing the BBC so low – Boris Johnson

Two weeks ago, the BBC was covered in glory. At the London Press Club Awards, Jeremy Bowen was named Broadcaster of the Year, Chris Mason won Political Journalist of the Year, and Sue Mitchell from the corporation’s investigations unit collected the Hugh Cudlipp Award for campaigning journalism for her exposé of a gang using fake wills to steal properties from the estates of the dead.

All in all, then, a triumph for BBC News, not least when Bowen went up on stage and the whole room gave him a standing ovation. Among those applauding were journalists from The Sun, The Telegraph, The Times, the Mail and GB News.

Bowen was praised especially for his reporting of the Israel-Palestine conflict. There was not a hint of criticism of him, or Mason or Mitchell or the BBC.

Yet here we are, and the director general, Tim Davie, and Deborah Turness, head of news, have both quit.

Those on the right are ecstatic, none more so than Boris Johnson, who has led a campaign ever since he was in power against the BBC, accusing the broadcaster of displaying sustained anti-right prejudice.

In splicing Donald Trump’s speech to make it appear as though he exhorted the Capitol Hill demonstrators to fight when he did not, there is no doubt that Panorama committed a huge mistake.

Neither is it just any other news programme – Panorama is the flagship – and nor is Trump an ordinary target; they could not have picked a worse one, in terms of the likely response once the error was revealed, if they’d tried.

The Trump clip formed part of a report prepared by Michael Prescott, the former independent external adviser to the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee. It was one of 19 instances used to highlight bias. Others included coverage of the transgender debate and the BBC Arabic channel’s reporting on Gaza. But the Panorama episode was the centrepiece. That’s what sparked the chain of events that led to Davie’s departure and brought glee in the White House.

“It’s a plot,” say the BBC’s supporters, “nothing less than a coup by its enemies to rid the taxpayer-funded body of what they perceive as its institutional left-leaning.”

Putting aside the richness of Johnson getting steamed up about inaccuracy and falsehood, he does have a point when he says: “The first I heard of Michael Prescott’s report was when I saw it on the Telegraph website. The Panorama fabrication is scandalous. Why don’t you try to establish how and why that happened rather than making up more mad lefty nonsense?”

That aspect – of how the programme came to be made and the controls, or lack of them, that were applied – is being lost amid the storm. Likewise, what is also forgotten is the enormous scale of the BBC’s output and the admiration its journalism generally engenders.

Absent too, however, is how it was that Prescott came to be appointed. How was it that a single arbiter was able to pronounce so determinedly? He wasn’t working with a team; he was not chairing a committee. He was previously appointed by the Johnson government to be the external interviewer for the next head of Ofcom, the UK’s media watchdog.

The Ofcom post was, in the eyes of Johnson and his colleagues, as pivotal a role as running the BBC. They wanted Paul Dacre, the former editor of the Daily Mail, to land the plum job.

Prescott was accused of a conflict of interest. A government spokesperson said on his behalf: “The recruitment process for the Ofcom chair is fair and open, and there are no conflicts of interest. Mr Prescott’s role on the panel has been approved by the independent commissioner for public appointments.”

That was in 2021. Now, up has popped Prescott again, this time in relation to the BBC. Prescott is a friend of Sir Robbie Gibb, Theresa May’s ex-spin doctor and one of those who later launched GB News. Gibb is one of five governmental appointees on the BBC board. He was put there by the Johnson regime.

Gibb was accused of trying to block Jess Brammar, the former executive editor of HuffPost UK and deputy editor of Newsnight, from overseeing the BBC’s news channels. When it came to the external adviser position, Gibb is said to have been keen for Prescott to obtain the brief and was a member of the four-strong panel that conducted the selection interviews.

The BBC has insisted: “[The editorial adviser roles] were advertised externally as part of the BBC’s open and fair competition process, and Michael Prescott was interviewed by a panel of board members who made the collective decision to appoint him.”

In presenting his dossier, Prescott states: “I have never been a member of any political party and do not hold any hard-and-fast views on matters such as American politics or disputes in the Middle East. My views on the BBC’s treatment of the subjects covered below do not come with any political agenda.”

It is hard, though, given the history of animosity between Johnson and the BBC, Gibb’s involvement, Prescott having twice been favoured, and what has unfolded, to avoid the conclusion that some sort of determined effort to clean up the BBC leadership, as Johnson and his pals would have it, has succeeded. Johnson maintains that is “complete and utter b*****ks”. He claims not to have spoken to Gibb or Prescott nor been in contact with them for many years.

That may be so, but the whiff of conspiracy is pungent.

Johnson, Trump and others have their prize. In some respects, given what transpired regarding Panorama, the quitting of Turness might have been justified. But Davie?

To think, there was once a British politician who said Trump was “frankly unfit to hold the office of President of the United States”. His name was Boris Johnson.