Oral evidence: The work of the BBC, HC 331

Oral evidence, 24 November 2025.

Witnesses

Caroline Daniel and Michael Prescott.

Chair

Welcome to this afternoon’s meeting of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, on the work of the BBC. Our first panel is Caroline Daniel and Michael Prescott, former external editorial advisers for the BBC editorial guidelines and standards committee. Thank you both for being with us. Today’s hearing stems from the memo that was written by Mr Prescott and sent to the BBC board, raising questions about editorial standards and impartiality, and that subsequently found its way into the media. Initially, we asked the BBC for the memo and its response to the concerns raised, and we had invited Mr Prescott to appear, but as the days went on and the BBC seemed unwilling or unable to respond to the growing concern, we decided to hold a broader session to look not only at the issues raised in the memo, but at the governance of the BBC, not least because of the resignations of the director general and the head of news, and then, on Friday, the resignation of Shumeet Banerji as a non-executive member of the board. You will not be surprised to know that since we announced the session we have received a lot of correspondence from a lot of different people with very different views of the BBC and its reporting. We will not be publishing that, but we are grateful to everyone who took the time to contact us. We also requested and have received confidential board papers from the EGSC relating to the “Panorama” broadcast, and from the board in response to Mr Prescott’s memo. We will not be publishing those either, but they will inform our questioning, especially of the second panel. I remind Members to declare any interests before they ask their questions. Welcome, Michael and Caroline. Michael, we are here because a memo that you wrote was the catalyst for the resignation of three members of the board, including the director general. The corporation now faces a $1 billion lawsuit from the President of one of our closest allies. I do not need to spell out the seriousness of that for everyone in the room or those watching but, suffice to say, it cannot be overstated that it is a critical time for the BBC and for public service broadcasting in general. How did we get here?

Michael Prescott

I suppose the saga does begin with the memo that I wrote. At the most fundamental level, I wrote that memo—let me be clear—because I am a strong supporter of the BBC. The BBC employs talented professionals across all its factual and non-factual programmes, and most people in this country, certainly myself included, might go so far as to say that they love the BBC. What troubled me was that during my three years on the BBC standards committee we kept seeing incipient problems that I thought were not being tackled properly. Indeed, I thought the problems were getting worse. What was especially troubling was that it was all happening at the time when the BBC faces this fabulous, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, because in the era of fake news the BBC really can become the go-to provider of news for the entire world. I think that is something that could happen, and I would like it to happen, but it can happen successfully only if the BBC does a better job of addressing the incipient and growing problems of the type that the standards committee kept identifying. That is why I tried to alert the BBC board to what was going on, and thereafter sent the memo on to Ofcom and DCMS. There was no ideology at play here—no party politics. To take the example of the US elections report that came before the committee, if it had found that Kamala Harris had been misrepresented, not Donald Trump, I would have acted in exactly the same way, because I do not want the BBC’s coverage skewed this way or that way. I just want it to be impartial, accurate and fair.

Chair

Were you surprised that your memo about BBC editorial standards led to the resignation of the head of BBC News and then the director general?

Michael Prescott

I was, because I never envisaged events playing out in the way they did. I was hoping that the concerns I had could and would be addressed privately. In the first instance, that was why I wrote to the board. For reasons I can go into if you wish, it became pretty clear to me that the board was not taking stuff as seriously as I had hoped and assumed it would, so I then sent the memo on to Ofcom and DCMS. I am very clear—members of this Committee are experts on this stuff; you will know this—that Ofcom and DCMS have very limited powers over the BBC, and rightly so, because the BBC is independent. Nevertheless, I had hoped that someone senior, be it at DCMS or from Ofcom, might have a classic “quiet word” with the high-ups at the BBC, saying, “You are taking this with adequate seriousness, aren’t you?” Indeed, we now know, since the leak, that Michael Grade at Ofcom has said—I hope I am not misrecalling this—that he was planning to have some kind of discussion with the BBC. I was hoping it could all be sorted out fairly quietly. As it happens, I think six days after I sent the memo to Ofcom and DCMS, there it was in the Telegraph. That then led to this whole sequence of events, including the resignations you mention—resignations which I take absolutely no pleasure in.

Chair

In his resignation statement, Tim Davie described the BBC as “a critical ingredient of a healthy society” and said: “We should champion it, not weaponise it.” Who do you think he was aiming that comment at?

Michael Prescott

I saw that. Look, obviously you would have to ask Tim Davie himself, but my suspicion is that the last bit of his remark was targeted at big C Conservatives, who were piling in after this appeared in The Telegraph. The whole chain of events was not ideal from my point of view. By the way, I don’t want to be rude: if anyone who saw that memo and its contents took it seriously and had concerns—including big C Conservatives—I am glad. I do not want people to think I am getting at one party rather than the other. But it is a matter of fact that because you had these big C Conservatives coming out and welcoming it, some people jumped to the conclusion that some sort of ideological exercise was going on. But from my point of view, there really wasn’t. I do not want the BBC leaning this way or that way; I just want it straight, impartial and fair.

Chair

In her resignation statement, Deborah Turness said that “recent allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong.” Do you think the BBC is institutionally biased?

Michael Prescott

No, I don’t. I am sure someone is going to correct me pretty quickly if I am wrong, but I just reread the memo yet again, outside the door, and I do not think I used that phrase anywhere in the memo, and I do not think it is institutionally biased. Let’s be very clear: tons of stuff that the BBC does, both factual programming and non-factual programming, is world class. I was a political correspondent at the Daily Mirror, The Sunday Times and other places for 14 years. I think the standard of BBC Westminster is exemplary, and that is why I keep saying that these were incipient problems. We were finding the odd problem here and the odd problem there. The crucial thing, when I say “the odd problem here and there”, that every single thing we spotted, as per my memo, seemed to me to have systemic causes. The root of my disagreement, and slight concern even today, is that the BBC was not—I hope they will change, but will they?—treating these as having systemic causes. There is real work that needs to be done at the BBC.

Chair

Do you think the failings you highlighted were serious enough to require the resignation of the DG and the head of news?

Michael Prescott

Not if they had a plan to get on top of things and treat these things as systemic problems. Look, I am keenly aware—I do not want to come before you sounding like I’m some sort of pompous figure. It is not necessarily for me—humble old me—to tell the director general of the BBC exactly how to do his job. But you have asked me a straight question. I would have hoped they would get on top of these problems and start sorting them out in a systemic and more methodical way, and everything would have been fine.

Chair

What do you think, Caroline?

Caroline Daniel

My experience was that the BBC took issues of impartiality extremely seriously. We have all heard Tim Davie put impartiality at the centre of his time as director general. In the three years I was involved with the BBC, and prior to that with the Serota review, I felt it was a continuous process—an active debate. These are dynamic issues, and often very complicated issues, of impartiality. They are decided in the context of individual programmes, on a daily basis, across thousands of hours of coverage. There was a healthy debate. You have heard from Michael; in the EGSC it was a healthy debate, and often a very robust debate about some of these issues. But was the BBC willing to have a proper conversation—a debate—and actually take action? In my view, yes, they were.

Chair

Okay. Thank you.

Jeff Smith

Before we get into the issues arising from the memo, can we talk about the role of the editorial guidelines and standards committee? You are here, obviously, as external advisers to it. Can you talk about its purpose, and how each of you were recruited and appointed to it?

Caroline Daniel

I first got involved with the BBC via the Nick Serota review. I had spent 20 years in journalism, most of it at the Financial Times, but also at the New Statesman and The Economist magazine. The BBC really matters to me. As an institution, I think it is extremely important and, as Michael said, particularly in an era of AI—I spend a lot of time on AI—when 52% of the internet is supposed to be AI generated. I think it is an extraordinarily important institution to get this right. I worked on the Nick Serota review for about six months—it was a significant review—and then when the opportunity came up to become an editorial adviser to the committee, I was very keen to help to enforce what we had found in the Serota review. There are multiple recommendations in the Serota review, which I can walk through, but at a high level, one included having broader editorial advisers on the committee. That is what led to us being appointed. Part of that was led by Ofcom, which wanted to expand the range of editorial opinion available to the BBC. The second thing that came out of the Serota review, which was a key part of our implementation and actually the day-to-day work of the committee, was the introduction of new thematic reviews. These are really significant pieces of work. They took many months of work. There were usually hundreds of interviews behind them, and they were very comprehensive reviews of impartiality in BBC coverage. We looked at immigration, for example, and the committee looked at the role of the coverage of the economy. These were very important pieces of work. They are comprehensive and extremely detailed, and they are ongoing. Alongside that, there were independent reviews of programmes, there was monitoring of impartiality, and new guidelines were initiated in terms of training. That is a quick sketch. In the end, we had 39 recommendations from the Serota review, which we were involved in implementing on behalf of the committee. A lot of the work in the first two years was very much about implementing the Serota review and the outcomes.

Michael Prescott

That is a fantastic run-through by Caroline. Is there any bit of your question that you think is unaddressed that I can actually add value on?

Jeff Smith

Am I right to read into what Caroline said that in the thematic reviews the committee is looking not just at things that have gone wrong, but proactively at future challenges?

Caroline Daniel

Yes. One of the committee’s key tasks is future editorial risks. Michael’s account gives a personal view of issues on the committee for him. One of the issues I am particularly interested in is the role of AI, which is really important, and whether the BBC is embracing AI and thinking about it appropriately. In an era of fake news, that is even more important, so we did have reviews looking at the role of AI at the BBC. When I left the BBC and the role, one of the issues I spoke to Chris Saul about was how far we are making sure the committee continues to have enough time for really deep dives into future editorial risks. Much longer sessions on some of those issues would be really welcome.

Michael Prescott

Again, Caroline has summarised it fantastically. The thematic reviews are proactive. They are not waiting for an obvious thing to go wrong or analysing whether something was quite right, which was the case with a lot of things in my memo. But even on the thematic reviews, my disagreement with the BBC is about the thoroughness with which it takes action and follows things through in this area of editorial standards. One of the thematic reviews, which I think may have been the first one, was on tax and spend and how the BBC covers issues to do with the economy—Government tax and spending, and so on. There were a number of recommendations from that, with one of them being, for example, that it should become routine that if someone on a news current affairs show says, “We need more money spent on x”, they should be challenged with, “Well, that’s fine, but what’s the trade-off? Do you want tax to go up?” That was one of the many recommendations of the review, but it is a very simple to one to understand. I remember that when the conclusions came before the committee—I think it was my first or second meeting—I asked what the follow-up was going to be. At that stage, I did not know the ins and outs of how every bit of the BBC worked, so I said, “After each news or current affairs show, will there be a tick list that includes the question, ‘Were people challenged in accordance with these new recommendations?’?” I was pretty much told, “Don’t worry about it. Everyone knows this report. Everyone in the BBC has read it and takes it very seriously.” Now, one way or another—partly because of my long years as a journalist for 20 years—I know all sorts of people in the BBC, from a junior sub-editor I worked with in the 1980s to very senior people. Not one person I spoke to had read the report. Very few were aware of it. Later, when we got follow-up reports, they did not give a gold star, with 10 out of 10 for implementation. I’m afraid that, at every step of the way, the BBC fell short on thoroughness when it came to implementation.

Jeff Smith

To what extent is that the fault of the committee? You talked about systemic problems; where do they lie?

Michael Prescott

I’m afraid to say that it is ultimately with management. The standards committee has independent advisers—Caroline and myself—and non-executive members. I do give credit to management, by the way. This may sound a trivial point, but I was always impressed with it: the meetings would go on for two or three hours, and the director general, head of news and deputy director of news always made time. They fully attended, and paid full attention. To your question, I do not think the committee was at fault. I just think that the BBC had a bit of a blind spot when it came to following through as methodically as I—I appreciate that I am only one individual—thought they should.

Jeff Smith

Is that the fault of individuals? You talked about it being systemic, but it sounds like you are putting the blame on individuals for not following through.

Michael Prescott

I do not know whether it is a management culture thing or an excess of faith in how things will be implemented down at programme editor level, but that is exactly the kind of thing I would like them to look into. You are now almost—borderline—talking about these systemic faults that I am so obsessed about. I think they needed to look at why the implementation was not better.

Chair

Caroline, Michael wrote in his memo that he found Jonathan Munro and Deborah Turness quite “defensive” when issues were raised. Did you?

Caroline Daniel

I think the BBC is the most scrutinised media organisation in the country. From my experience at the Financial Times, it is a very different level of public scrutiny. It is scrutinised, obviously, by this Committee, by members of the public, through editorial complaints and by its audience. There are obviously many ways to make a compliant to the BBC. Are there times when they are necessarily defensive on some issues in that context? Yes. But as a broad characterisation, I would say that I did not find the BBC to be defensive. I found the BBC to be actively engaged in discussions about how to improve issues of partiality on very complicated subjects. This is a live, dynamic debate where the context changes all the time. It is not one and done; this is obviously a live debate. There can be differences of opinion about whether the BBC went far enough on some of the issues that were raised in the committee. Some of the issues raised were significant, but what is important is that the BBC was raising them itself. They were coming up via the EGSC, which commissioned research from David Grossman to help to facilitate that robust debate and review of impartiality.

Chair

You guys, as independent advisers to the EGSC, had this unique opportunity to be almost a fly on the wall of how the committee was working, so give us a flavour of how decisions were reached. Would you say there was a degree of camaraderie and common purpose when it came to the pursuit of impartiality and journalistic integrity on the EGSC?

Caroline Daniel

I found it to be an active debate in the committee. You will hear from Robbie in your next panel. He is robust in how he expresses his opinion, and he wants the BBC to do well. Michael has given an account of some of the issues that we covered in the committee, but most of the committee was involved in looking at things like editorial complaints, monitoring impartiality across the BBC, looking at reviews of the BBC and thinking ahead about issues that were coming up. We debated a broad range of issues on the committee. It was not always a contested space, but there were times when there were significant issues to be discussed by the committee. Obviously you have seen some of the research from David Grossman, which is in Michael’s report, and that of course led to an important discussion. I would say that, each time, the BBC executive team would come back and debate those issues with us. Ultimately, we were both advisers to the committee, and it was for the committee itself—the four board members—to work out what significant action should be taken next.

Chair

From what you just said, it sounds like some of the committee members were more vocal, or more dominant in the conversation than others.

Caroline Daniel

I wouldn’t agree. It was a very open committee. People could say what they thought.

Chair

The EGSC has been politicised in the way that it came to some of these decisions. In The Guardian this morning, it suggests that all members came from a certain political viewpoint. Is that your experience?

Caroline Daniel

That would not be my characterisation of how the committee worked, no.

Michael Prescott

I endorse everything Caroline says. Most of it was great. They were very respectful, open discussions. Most of the decisions that were taken were unanimous. I know there are some people saying, “This is a weird tick list that Prescott has come up with in his memo,” but my memo simply quotes extensively internal BBC reports, and maybe with one or one and a half exceptions, they were all commissioned by the full committee. There was an awful lot of consensus. I hope I do not end up being a broken record, but the one area where there was not consensus was those reports by David Grossman—fabulous, very professional ex-“Newsnight” reporter. The reports he was coming through with, many of them quoted in my memo, there was not unanimity in how to respond to those—clearly; you can see it in the memo. Other than that, I would totally endorse what Caroline says.

Chair

And there was no one member of that committee who was more dominant than any other.

Michael Prescott

No. I don’t think so—that was never my impression.

Cameron Thomas

Mr Prescott, you just said that the BBC is not institutionally biased. What is your bias, if you have one?

Michael Prescott

It is always a tough job, spotting your own biases. You know when you read about these “centrist dads”—I think I am a centrist dad. That would probably cover it. Actually, to that question, I know you have folks have not gone here so far, but there has been a lot of stuff in some of the papers about Robbie Gibb. The Chair was asking whether one personality was more dominant than another; you are asking about my preferences. I am no ideological soulmate of Robbie Gibb, for example—I am a centrist dad.

Cameron Thomas

I’m a centrist dad too, but a company that you work for received more than £100,000 from Larry Ellison, a Republican mega-donor. You will be aware that Donald Trump has removed funding from a lot of public service broadcasters. Is it true that you actually want the BBC to be impartial, based on those affiliations?

Michael Prescott

Yes, that is totally true—of course it is.

Cameron Thomas

You said there is some real work to be done at the BBC. Along what lines? Do you think any of that work should be done at the boardroom level?

Michael Prescott

I think it is a job for the executive, overseen by bodies like the board and the standards committee. If I give you an example, it might help explain what I mean. One of my sadnesses was that, when this thing leaked into the public domain, so much focus—although I understand why—went on the Trump “Panorama”. The thing I felt most passionately about was when the BBC put out one day, over 12 hours, on all its bulletins, a story saying that ethnic minority people in this country were being charged more for their insurance purely because of their ethnicity. When David Grossman looked into it, he found the story to be utterly untrue. It is a dreadful thing to have put out, particularly given that it is wrong. It must have been deeply upsetting for many people out there, particularly ethnic minority people who heard that story all day long. Anyway, it was not true. You just have to ask yourself, “How could the BBC get this so wrong? Who had the idea of doing this story? Who conceived of it? Who did the initial research? Who did the initial reporting? Who wrote the script? Which editors, across the whole of the BBC, all day, cleared a completely untrue report?” There were multiple levels of editorial failure. Now, we never got a good accounting for that at the standards committee, and I would have expected, with a better culture when it came to these things, a complete look at every single failure, and ideas for correction. Many times at the committee meetings when things came up—many of them in my memo—I said, “This makes me worry about recruitment, training, professional standards, the systems and the processes.” In the chairman’s memo, I know that he tries to say, “Oh, all this stuff has been resolved. We dealt with it all.” To me, what I was frequently seeing was that the BBC’s idea of dealing with something was to change the editors around and tweak the written guidelines, but to take the story I just mentioned, there never seemed to be any willingness to look into exactly what went wrong there and whether there were deep implications. Of course, since the memo came out, you have had people like Mark Urban, the very respected former BBC correspondent, who has done a piece on Substack—I do not whether you have read it, but it is worth reading. In that piece, he is not criticising my memo—far from it—but he says that he thinks there are issues like this in the BBC, and there are deep cultural forces at play here. There is a lot for them to look at.

Cameron Thomas

You have mentioned the memo a few times. You have also told us that you sent it to Ofcom and DCMS, and you had that meeting with the BBC. Two weeks later, The Telegraph had that memo, and it said that it was circulating around Government Departments. Do you have any idea how that memo got to those other Departments or The Daily Telegraph?

Michael Prescott

No. Absolutely not. All that I know is what I have stated.

Cameron Thomas

Did you share that memo with anybody else beyond the BBC board?

Michael Prescott

Absolutely not—well, with Ofcom and DCMS, but beyond that, no.

Cameron Thomas

So there is a leak somewhere.

Michael Prescott

That seems to be the case.

Cameron Thomas

Any idea where that might be?

Michael Prescott

No, I have no idea.

Chair

Did you work with anyone else when you prepared your memo?

Michael Prescott

No, it was all my own work.

Natasha Irons

Thanks very much for coming in today. Caroline, you have mentioned the Serota review and talked about the depth of work involved. I want to pick up on a couple of points. The review found a culture of defensiveness at the BBC, especially around admitting mistakes, as the Chair mentioned. That was in 2021; have things improved?

Caroline Daniel

I think they have improved. We can point to things like Tim Davie on Glastonbury; that was a speedy apology, and rightly so. There are probably many other examples where the BBC has apologised over the last few years. I would say that the real issue is the culture of the BBC in the level of attention paid to these issues. Again, in my view, it was really significant that we had a robust committee to debate issues of impartiality, and that we had David Grossman being commissioned by the EGSC to ask questions about the BBC’s coverage to help inform future coverage. I think there are few organisations where you have that level of auditing internally on a regular basis. This is an ongoing issue; this is not one and done in terms of managing these issues.

Natasha Irons

You mentioned Tim Davie’s robust and very quick response to Glastonbury. Do you have any idea why the robust and quick response did not come this time around?

Caroline Daniel

I was not involved in the issues with the board, so I’m afraid that I was not privy to discussions, and I did not know that Michael had sent the report until I read about it in the newspaper.

Natasha Irons

Michael, do you have a view as to why there was a bit more of a delay when it came to a robust response?

Michael Prescott

When my memo had leaked?

Natasha Irons

Yes.

Michael Prescott

No. I know only the same as you: what I was reading in the newspapers. Sorry.

Natasha Irons

Fair enough. How has the Serota review changed working practices and culture practically at the BBC? We keep coming back culture and transparency, but how has it actually changed anything?

Caroline Daniel

I will give a few examples. First, there are internal programme reviews, which were reported on to the EGSC. If there were particular issues with a programme, they all led internally, and we were given a high-level view of whether the programme was performing well or not, and some of the outcomes were those reviews. It is frustrating and difficult for programme makers to have that additional level of insight into what is happening and to be asked questions, but I think that is important. The thematic reviews are significant pieces of work. I point to the immigration review, which was a substantial piece of work by Madeleine Sumption. In fact, Madeleine continued to be involved with the BBC for another year, advising the BBC and going around the regions, speaking about immigration and the better ways to cover it, and asking questions. It was a very thorough process of her and her team continuing to act on behalf of the BBC, giving recommendations and advice, and being available as a resource on issues of immigration and how to cover it well, which is a challenging issue. In terms of specific practical impacts, those are two good examples. I think a third example is performance reviews. Again, we understood that impartiality was becoming a big issue, which played into how people were being judged as good editors of programmes. It was an issue in terms of how impartiality was embedded into a new performance culture. Could there be improvements? Yes, and I have a few ideas on things that might continue to be improved, but I do think it had an impact. It also had a lot of focus on training, not surprisingly; you have lots of people coming in and out of the BBC. People who are outside the BBC also have to do the editorial training. I think that across a number of areas there was a systematic change in what we were doing on the committee and what we were seeing.

Natasha Irons

How, then, did we reach the position we are in now, where you, Michael, felt compelled to write your memo? Is there an issue around transparency at the BBC? Is there an issue with just being transparent and honest when things go wrong?

Michael Prescott

I think there kind of is when it comes to self-criticism. Caroline has described the processes very well. The BBC does try to look at itself and it has done a lot of the right things and a lot of responsible things, but I think that when it comes to following through on actions, it is not always fantastic, and you do get levels of denial as per my memo. Whether it was the issues in covering the US presidential race or Israel-Gaza or whatever, you got these reports through from David Grossman and the management’s response was to just plain deny it and say, “We don’t agree with them.” What was the rationale? Did they find David Grossman wrong on the facts or out-argue his rationale? No, they just disagreed with them and did not do anything.

Chair

To what extent do you think there is an issue with the comms at the BBC? It feels like there is some kind of muscle memory of how to mishandle allegations of editorial mishaps and mistakes. Is there a problem with their communication? Quite often you get a very defensive, very short statement that comes out in the initial period and then a bit more self-reflection and self-flagellation a bit further down the line. To what extent is that just my perception?

Michael Prescott

It is a mighty big organisation and sometimes it is difficult to check out all the facts internally and make the most powerful statement that you can. I think it is more to do with what I suspect are some cultural forces at work in the BBC. Even as I sit here before you now, I do not think the BBC has been very willing to look at things through that prism.

Chair

Do you feel that there is a culture endemic in the BBC?

Michael Prescott

I think there could be. I certainly do not claim to be an expert on this. I already commended to the Committee the piece by Mark Urban, who I think spent many decades in the BBC, and there are others. The things we were seeing and the management reaction to some of the issues that I outlined in my memo make me fear that that could be a component of what is going wrong. That is why at the start of this meeting I kept referring to incipient problems. I do not think this is catastrophic yet, but I do think that it seemed that things were getting worse. That was my honest perspective and hopefully it is reflected in the memo that you have read.

Chair

To what extent do you think it is that that undermines people’s trust in the BBC?

Michael Prescott

Well, trust in the BBC is a big subject, isn’t it? It is not even all party political. You have an urban/rural bias, possibly, and a London focus—London values versus values outside of the capital. There is a lot there.

Chair

Do you wish to expand?

Michael Prescott

On trust in the BBC?

Chair

Yes.

Michael Prescott

Well, this is kind of what my memo was about. The public expect the BBC to be honest, accurate, impartial and fair. It is most of the time. It needs to do a better job when it is caught out not being so. That’s it.

Chair

Would you say one of its headlines would be that the BBC is defensive?

Michael Prescott

Yes, I would. For example—I hope I am not being boring continually referring back to this memo—another thing in my memo was that there was this strange episode with a group of Oxbridge historians calling themselves History Reclaimed. I think they sampled four or five programmes. In a a carefully written report—they did not overclaim; they were honest about the limited number of shows they watched—they said, “We do seem to notice a tendency that in all these shows, instead of getting the foremost historical expert in the field, they are getting people who are far more inexpert, and our suspicion is that that is because they are giving them controversial quotes rather than the best take you could possibly get.” As per my report, I thought that was interesting and should be looked into because History Reclaimed also had a very simple fix, which was asking whether the BBC could have another look at who it was inviting in from the field of historians to comment on things. That was it. Would the BBC listen? No. In fact, there were then formal complaints—I am guessing from readers who had seen that report, and based on it—and the BBC rejected them all and accused History Reclaimed of cherry-picking, in a very snotty fashion. History Reclaimed did not claim to be doing more than that. They said, “We’ve watched four or five programmes; there might be a problem here. Could you take a look at it?” The answer was, “Formal findings: you’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong. We're not talking to you.” Extraordinary.

Chair

Do you think the BBC is arrogant?

Michael Prescott

Not institutionally, no. When you run a big outfit like that—you will all appreciate this—you have to maintain staff morale and the management have to be seen to be defending their own folks. Believe it or not, even after that memo, I totally get that. But they get it a little bit wrong. I think that was one instance and there are others in the memo.

Cameron Thomas

Mr Prescott, is the BBC in a better place for the three resignations? Should public trust be greater or lower after them?

Michael Prescott

It is very hard to answer, because the answer depends on each individual citizen’s perception of what has gone on.

Cameron Thomas

You speak of culture; it starts from the top, does it not?

Michael Prescott

Usually, yes. You want to know, bluntly, whether I think it is better or worse for not having Tim Davie and the rest of them there. Cameron Thomas indicated assent.

Michael Prescott

Let me answer this way. First, I took no pleasure in those people feeling compelled to leave their jobs. As regards Tim Davie in particular, for what little use or worth this is to him now, personally I always liked the guy and, most importantly, to the extent that inexpert me can judge, he seemed to be doing a first-rate job across 80% or 90% of the portfolio. It was just that he had this blind spot on editorial failings. I think it is a bit of a tragedy he has gone. I thought he was a supreme talent, but he had this blind spot.

Cameron Thomas

Okay. Thank you.

Chair

Michael, were you pleased that your memo found its way into the press?

Michael Prescott

No—gosh.

Jeff Smith

Were you surprised?

Michael Prescott

Yes, I was surprised. First, as I think I said a little while ago, I was hoping this might be sorted out quietly, with the board, Ofcom and DCMS. Secondly—I alluded to this—believe it or not, I was hoping the memo would do good and result in a better BBC being quietly achieved. Then it was in The Telegraph. I am not criticising The Telegraph—they gave it a lot of space and took it very seriously—but in ideological terms The Telegraph appeals to a certain bit of the spectrum. I think the fact that they broke the story became a bit of a barrier to people elsewhere on the political spectrum taking this as seriously or thinking it really was as straightforward as it seems.

Chair

On your comment about Tim Davie having a bit of a blind spot in an editorial sense, to what extent do you think that is simply because the DG job is just too big for one person?

Michael Prescott

I have been thinking for a while that it is, and what has happened to Tim confirms that. Again, I am not here to claim that I am the biggest expert in the world on organisational design but, as you ask me—and I was an adviser to the committee—I think that the BBC might be well advised to consider having an editor-in-chief on the one hand and a CEO on the other. I very well remember the period in the 1980s when they did try that, and John Birt was at first not in charge of the whole enterprise, and the role was split. It is probably worth looking at that again.

Chair

Do you have a view on that, Caroline?

Caroline Daniel

My role was as an editorial adviser to the EGSC. The issues of whether the overall structure of the BBC and the governance for Tim versus the role is obviously for this Committee and the BBC board. It is a very large and complicated role, and it is very hard to get it right consistently. In previous times we have had a deputy director general of the BBC. It is such a large role and there are a lot of issues, so it might benefit from that.

Chair

Is that how you would rather see it split—a DG and a deputy DG? Or would you rather, as Michael suggests, have an editor-in-chief alongside a DG?

Caroline Daniel

I do not really have a perspective. I have a personal view, as an average person looking at this, but I do not believe that—

Chair

What is your personal view?

Caroline Daniel

My personal view is what I just said. It is a large job with a lot of responsibilities, and it is an important institution to get this right in.

Cameron Thomas

Mr Prescott, you spoke quite highly of Tim Davie. What was your relationship with Shumeet Banerji? Did you have a relationship with him?

Michael Prescott

No, I don’t know the individual.

Vicky Foxcroft

You rightly pointed out that the “Panorama” programme has been picked up quite a lot, in terms of your note. It was discussed at two meetings of the EGSC, in January and May. Why do you think the EGSC failed to act satisfactorily at either meeting?

Michael Prescott

Probably the best way to answer that—it will certainly help me to give you a good answer—is if I go through the chronology. I happened to be at home and I watched that “Panorama”. It struck me as having issues to do with balance; I did not think it was quite what I might have expected. I still was not too bothered, because I thought, “Oh, that’s quite an anti-Trump programme, but they’ll probably be just as hard on Kamala Harris next week,” but they were not. I mentioned that at the committee, and David Grossman was asked to look into it all. He came back in January with the findings that are summarised in my memo. The BBC executive did not seem—how shall I put it?—very open to accepting what David was saying. They were asked, and they very happily agreed—as I say, there is usually consensus on the committee—to go away and come back with a written response, having seemed, certainly to my recollection and I suspect others’, not to be open to accepting what David was saying, even though his findings were so stark. They came back in May with a written response—again, parts of the written response are quoted in my memo—and it was black and white: the management did not accept there was a problem either overall with the US presidential coverage or with the “Panorama” programme. It was as simple as that.

Jeff Smith

The Grossman report says that the coverage of the election issues was “generally excellent”.

Michael Prescott

Yes. I hope I have been clear that I am focusing on incipient problems that need addressing. In my memo—I was trying to summarise it all for the board of the BBC—I think it is seven points or something, kicking off with them having ignored or broken their own guidelines on use of opinion polling. There was a lot to the Grossman report. It is good that you mentioned that, because it kind of gives you the context. That was very much the BBC management’s view: it was great, they were excellent, and page 3 of David Grossman’s report says it was all excellent. Well, there was a lot to praise. By the way, I have been a reporter, and I hope the BBC Washington staff do not think I am sitting here getting at them—I know they are doing tough jobs. But David Grossman did not give it an absolute gold star. There are a lot of issues, as summarised in my memo. Does that cover your point?

Jeff Smith

Well, I think there could be an accusation that you did not represent the Grossman report fairly in your memo, and that you picked up all the points that he made that were criticisms of the BBC, without stating the context, which was, generally speaking, that he was positive about the coverage, and had put forward these particular problems as issues that needed to be corrected for next time.

Michael Prescott

David Grossman would have to speak for himself. My take was, first, that he was being polite. Secondly, there were a lot of very specific instances in the full report, summarised in the memo, of things that had gone wrong. Remember that my memo to the board was conceived as a private memo to 14 people, and it was meant to be a call to action. I did not put in the stuff for celebration; it was very deliberately highlighting problems and faults that I felt were not being addressed properly.

Vicky Foxcroft

Going back to the “Panorama” documentary, you said you watched it on 6 January and that that was the point—

Michael Prescott

Sorry to interrupt—the show was just before the presidential race, so I think it was about late October.

Vicky Foxcroft

So you watched it, and that prompted you to put in complaints, even though there were no complaints about the “Panorama” documentary?

Michael Prescott

I would not characterise it as a complaint. That is not really how the standards committee worked. I watched the show, and even after watching it, although I thought, “There are a lot more anti-Trump witnesses than pro-Trump,” and so on—I thought it was a bit of an anti-Trump programme; I did not think it was as fair and balanced as you might typically expect from the BBC—I was not too alarmed. And, by the way, I rather enjoyed the programme. I thought, “Oh, well, they’ll probably do just as aggressive a look at Kamala Harris next week. That’s why this was so aggressive on Trump.” But there was not a balancing programme. I cannot remember now, and I would need to check whether I emailed David Grossman or raised it at the next committee meeting, but I simply said, “Could David have a look at the show?” I could have been wrong; actually, it could have been in line with the standards and all been fair enough. That is how it wound up being looked at.

Vicky Foxcroft

When did you include the “Panorama” programme in your memo? Was it at the start or later on?

Michael Prescott

My memo was written of a piece. Although it begins with the example of “Panorama”, because I thought it was a stark example of the sorts of things that had gone wrong and were not being addressed—that is why I nosed off the memo on it—everything in the memo was written way after. My last standards committee meeting was June, and it was some months after that I started writing the memo.

Cameron Thomas

Mr Prescott, you mentioned that the 6 January documentary was not of the editorial standard that you expected, but that you thought they might be just as hard on Kamala Harris. It has occurred to you, has it not, that Kamala Harris was not found by the January 6th Committee to have played an active role in the Capitol riots?

Michael Prescott

Absolutely.

Cameron Thomas

What would such a companion documentary to the Donald Trump documentary look like?

Michael Prescott

The Trump “Panorama” looked at his history and track record as a politician—he has obviously been President once already—and purported to be trying to look at the secret of his appeal. It also looked at what the consequences might be of him winning. If he lost, he might face more lawsuits; if he won, he could crush them—that sort of thing. An equivalent look at Kamala Harris might be, “What is her track record? What is the secret of her political appeal? What would the consequences be if she won?” It is pretty straight up and down, really—or to me it seems so.

Cameron Thomas

Do you agree with Donald Trump’s assertion that his reputation has been damaged by this documentary, considering that he was found to be a central figure in the insurrection, that he has been found by a civil court to be liable for sexual assault and that he has regularly boasted about sexual assault? Do you agree with Donald Trump that this documentary has harmed his image in some way?

Michael Prescott

If I could answer in two parts, first, I am supposing—but you will correct me if I am wrong—that I should restrain myself a little bit, given that there is potentially a legal action. All I can say is that I cannot think of anything that I agree with Donald Trump on.

Dr Huq

Very interesting. Thanks, both, for coming in. You have similar backgrounds in a way—Fleet Street and then the PR industry for a long time after that—but different conclusions. So this has been fascinating. You were both advising the EGSC. I think Jeff asked this earlier, but how did you hear about the job? I am curious to know. A lot of our constituents would probably like to advise the BBC. Where does it get advertised? How did you hear about it?

Michael Prescott

Can I beg your indulgence and give you what may be a longer answer?

Dr Huq

A shorter one is probably better. I really just want to know how you got the job, not a long anecdote.

Michael Prescott

I come from a working-class background. I am the son of immigrants. I got into Oxford from the local state school partly because of the excellence of public service broadcasting. I used to quote the shows in my essays. I have been passionate about public service broadcasting for decades. I read every spit and cough about the BBC. I followed the Martin Bashir scandal. I saw that Nicholas Serota did a review—Caroline was part of it. I saw in the newspapers that one of the recommendations was to create this post, and I thought, “What a fantastic job. I'd love to get that.” I looked out for the advert and I applied.

Dr Huq

And was it advertised?

Caroline Daniel

Yes. It was publicly advertised. Obviously, I was aware that they might create the role, because it was one of the recommendations of the Serota review. I was very interested in making sure that the Serota review went somewhere and that the actions it recommended were actually implemented, and I wanted to play a part in that.

Dr Huq

I was just curious to know. Also, on the Grossman researcher role—he is not here, is he?—I am curious to know where these things are advertised. I have never seen those adverts.

Michael Prescott

You are probably better directing that at the chairman, because I don’t know. It wasn’t openly advertised, was it? I think it was, in effect, an internal appointment for researcher, but you would need to check with the Beeb.

Dr Huq

You have said to us, Michael—and I think in your memo as well—that you have never been part of a political party, that you are a centrist dad and that you have no axe to grind. It says somewhere that you “do not hold any hard and fast views on matters such as American politics”. But if you go through the memo, there are some quite interesting terms. “Lawfare” is one that is used by the MAGA generation; that is used as a fact. I think you also critique the phrase “reproductive rights”, which is fairly common currency—we talk about it in this Parliament. You have also said that there should have been a programme that was equally aggressive towards Kamala Harris. Isn’t that a weird equivalence? Trump had had a term as President, and he had been found guilty of incitement? We know that that edit was very wrong. They should have indicated, like you would in written journalism with three dots, that these are two different parts of the speech. But some people are making conclusions. If you look at the things in the dossier, what have we got? We have Trump defence, trans and Gaza. Are these comments not all from one perspective?

Michael Prescott

Gosh. Thank you for the question. There is quite a lot there. On the selection of things that are in my memo, and that David Grossman looked at—you can check this with the BBC—I think there was only one that I suggested be looked at. In terms of that menu that you are referring to and saying it was a curious selection, the topics for David to look at were unanimously agreed by the whole committee, so they are not mine. You mentioned “lawfare” and “reproductive rights”, and I think I am right that those are words that appeared in David Grossman’s reports. I am not saying this of you, but there is a lot of misapprehension out there online and so on. In a funny way, a lot of my memo wasn’t written by me; it was me quoting David Grossman’s internal BBC reports. I think it was him who made the point about lawfare. It was not meant to be a party political or ideological point. He was making a very simple point that in America, unlike in Britain, if you get a prosecuting counsel, they may carry a party political stripe and be a political appointee, and that that was important for audience understanding of the full context of the onslaught on Trump. The term “reproductive rights” was in David Grossman’s American election report, where he was making the point that if correspondents use those terms as common parlance, there is a danger that you alienate part of the viewership who do not use that language. These were not my views; these were all me quoting from the internal BBC reports.

Dr Huq

But, Caroline, isn’t it the duty of all people on the board and the advisers to the board to represent all licence fee payers? That is millions and millions of people. It just looks like these particular hobby horse, culture war issues have been selected in one direction. Surely your responsibility is to all licence fee payers?

Michael Prescott

Do you mind if I jump in on this before you, Caroline?

Dr Huq

At the same time that you two served your term, there was a letter from 400 BBC employees. There are the all-staff meetings, including one just the week before last. We have been circulated a letter by 100 eminent BBC folk, including Dimblebys and whatnot. Those are very different from the selectively picked examples here, which all seem to betray a political bias themselves.

Michael Prescott

I have seen that point of view expressed online and so on.

Dr Huq

You are giving us articles, but you could look at Matthew Parris in The Spectator and his view of the Trump documentary, which I watched last night. It was 12 seconds within a 70-minute show. It was wrong—it was a bad edit—but I am sure there is loads in there that Trump would have liked, such as the MAGA superfans showing their adoration for him.

Michael Prescott

This idea that there is an ideological or party political skew to the work that was going on is not entirely fair. You have got to realise that when those reports were commissioned, we did not know what was going to come back. Take for example the BBC’s coverage of US presidential elections. When the committee asked David to look at that, he could have come back with a completely clean bill of health.

Dr Huq

Which he largely did.

Michael Prescott

Hang on. It is possible, I suppose, to conceive that he might have come back saying, “You know what? We were a bit unfair on Kamala Harris, because Trump is so bombastic and says such outrageous things”—

Dr Huq

But there is no equivalence there.

Michael Prescott

Obviously, you are free to disagree, but it could have been that Grossman came back and said, “We have been a bit unfair to Kamala Harris because Trump is so bombastic that we ended up giving her too little airtime.” As it happens, he came back saying that there was a skew against Trump’s side, but we did not know in advance that that is what his finding would be, so I do not think that it is entirely fair to suggest that the committee had an ideological hue in commissioning the bits of work that it did.

Dr Huq

No, I am saying that of the memo, not the committee. You are saying that you have to sling an equal amount of mud, but surely the role of the journalist is to tell the truth.

Michael Prescott

Yes, sure.

Dr Huq

Do you have to find a tit-for-tat thing, or do you tell what happened?

Michael Prescott

I certainly agree with what you say about the truth and about things being balanced. But the stuff in my memo, I think, covers almost all the David Grossman reports. It is not as if there were 100 reports, I picked these ones and they have an ideological flavour to them. I mentioned most of the reports that were done, and they were almost always commissioned by the whole committee.

Caroline Daniel

It was a long report—20 pages—looking at US election coverage as a whole, and the point was to look at whether there are areas of concern, bias or inaccuracies that might become a systemic issue and that we have to address going forwards? I am not saying that that report was a completely clean bill of health; there were issues that the BBC had to address, including whether we are reporting appropriately individuals who are being quoted, and whether the balance of geography in where the BBC’s operations were based in America was appropriate and representative of American coverage. In fact, the BBC realised that it probably needed to do more to change the balance of its geography. But what I took away from that report is that there was actually very good, powerful coverage of the US elections. I have a difference of opinion about how important the concerns were around the US election coverage as a whole, having read the David Grossman report.

Dr Huq

I am just thinking of this memo, which has had such an effect within a very short space of time. Our Committee is writing something before we have even seen the contents of the report. Within a week, two big heads have rolled, and another one since. You make a point about History Reclaimed. If you look into who these people are—they include Robert Tombs, who is a well-known Brexit person—they are all from a particular slant. I wonder if you are aware of your own biases in the examples you have chosen. For example, you say that you should not state that the idea that the Trump election was stolen was baseless. Do you think that the idea that the Trump election was stolen was baseless?

Michael Prescott

No, I absolutely do not. I do not remember that bit of the memo.

Dr Huq

On page 3 of the memo, it says something like he was found guilty of incitement by a Democrat-majority committee. Our Committee is majority Labour and we have a Conservative Chair. Are you saying that we are illegitimate?

Michael Prescott

Oh God, absolutely not! I am a great respecter of Parliament and the traditions of Parliament. I spent 15 years as a correspondent here. On the bit that you are referring to, when the executive defended “Panorama” and was trying to argue that there was no problem with the video splicing, one member of management prayed in aid the prosecution of Trump and the committee finding that you refer to. That is the only reference to it in there. I will deal with History Reclaimed because that was something I raised. It never led to a Grossman report, by the way; it was just one of my bugbears.

Dr Huq

You have raised it again in this sitting.

Michael Prescott

Yes. But all the rest of the stuff, as I keep saying, was not my tick list. These were reports commissioned by the entire committee for David Grossman to look into. We never knew what he would come back with. If you take the American presidential race, for example, he came back saying that it was a little bit unbalanced, but we did not know in advance that he would say that. On History Reclaimed, I can tell you, hand on heart, I never even googled the historians behind it; I just got that they were Oxbridge—

Dr Huq

I think you should, because they are not completely neutral people either, are they?

Michael Prescott

But you have to remember that all I was saying on the History Reclaimed thing—which still seems to me a small thing—was that they seemed to me, from what I read in the papers, very reasonable: they had spotted something little that was wrong, suggested something that sounded like a sensible fix, and the BBC would not even consider it.

Damian Hinds

To go back to the splicing, in his “sacred job” memo to us, Dr Shah mentions that since your memo, Mr Prescott, the corporation has had 500 complaints, which has prompted “further reflection.” As a result of that further reflection, the BBC now accepts that the splice gave the impression of “a direct call for violent action.” I remember the first time I saw the splice; I looked at it and thought, “Oh my God, that’s awful.” Then I checked a transcript of the speech itself, and that confirmed it. Were you surprised that it took the BBC multiple iterations and months to work out something as straightforward as the fact that that splice was that misleading?

Michael Prescott

Yes, in a word. In the memo, I talked about my great frustration and how I was writing to the board because of that frustration. That was a very easy example to understand—that we had a BBC management that would defend and stand by that video edit, which is exactly what was going on. That was one of the reasons I was in despair, but it was possibly the purest example.

Damian Hinds

Do you think the corporation has what you might call a “bigger truth” problem—that there is a bigger truth that the vast majority of BBC output is good, and therefore it is less important when something is misleading? Or that, on this specific episode of “Panorama”, there was a bigger truth the programme was trying to get across about that day on Capitol Hill and the character of President Trump, and therefore it did not matter so much that this thing was spliced in a way that created a specific impression that was clearly so misleading?

Michael Prescott

I think the truth is that we still do not know what went on within the “Panorama” production team—whether it was some weird kind of accident or someone working under pressure. We just do not know. Regarding the wider BBC, I have had people I know, and people I do not know, texting me, emailing me and so on, who were clearly appalled by that. So I do not think it is a bigger problem; it was just this curious management blind spot.

Damian Hinds

It was not just a management blind spot; lots of people must have had a blind spot, starting with the person who did it, then whoever was editing it, a producer—presumably somebody straight away. Obviously, it did not get the most massive audience, because people in general did not spot it, but many people must have seen it. Then your committee saw it, then it went up to the board. A lot of people apparently had a blind spot.

Michael Prescott

This is one of the most curious things about the whole saga, actually. I watched the programme, as I said, and I certainly did not spot that the video had been spliced. I had no idea, and I doubt—

Damian Hinds

It was a very good splice job—that is why.

Michael Prescott

It is interesting if you did, but I suspect—

Damian Hinds

No, I did not. It was an extremely good splice job where you could not see the seam. That is the point.

Michael Prescott

So you watched it and you did not realise it had happened. When I asked for the “Panorama” to be looked into, it was for reasons other than the video splicing—I thought there were other issues with it. Then the report came back. David Grossman, ex-“Newsnight”, a very respected, proper, fabulous BBC correspondent, had also spent time covering the US presidential election. It was one of those weird coincidences that the person who was asked by the standards committee to do a deep dive into “Panorama” was steeped in this material, because he had been out there covering it, and it was he who spotted the video splice. It was quite possible that, if it had been someone else asked to do a deep dive into “Panorama”, they might have come back still not spotting that. It was a curious turn of events.

Damian Hinds

That was in time for the January meeting. An awful lot of time has passed between January and November, so there were still a lot of people who had a blind spot. So after this thing had been identified—

Michael Prescott

That’s what I am saying.

Damian Hinds

I do not mean a literal blind spot, in that they did not spot the splice—I do not think anybody did—but rather that, its having been brought to people’s attention, a lot of people apparently overlooked it until, as Dr Shah says, having had 500 complaints after your memo, there has been a period of reflection.

Michael Prescott

I keep using the term blind spot, but you can use the terminology you want. They had a lack of sensitivity. They just had a different view about the video splice.

Damian Hinds

This question is for both of you. Do you agree that it is people who would like to see the demise of the BBC who are the ones—

Michael Prescott

Not me, by the way. I want it to be stronger.

Damian Hinds

No, no—let me finish my sentence. It is the people who would wish to see the demise of the BBC who ought to downplay this incident. The people who love the BBC and think it has a more important role than ever in the information meltdown and mosh pit of information and disinformation—they are the ones who will say that, when an incident like this comes along, it must be taken with the absolute utmost seriousness.

Michael Prescott

That sounds a very sensible point. People who love and support the BBC want the BBC to be at its best. That is what this whole thing has been about.

Caroline Daniel

Obviously, issues of trust are foundational to the BBC. It is very important that it takes inaccuracies extremely seriously. I would say—to echo Samir Shah—that it was regrettable that this was not recognised at the time. Even though “Panorama” was alerted, I think the BBC was too late to take action on it, but I would point to the fact that in the committee at the time it was a 20-page report, and the debate was really about a much broader, comprehensive view of US election coverage; it was not to micromanage a particular programme edit. Individual issues were typically dealt with by the editorial complaints unit, if there was an inaccuracy.

Damian Hinds

I am asking about a principle. I was asking about the splice—that is correct—but you could apply the same question to a number of other things in the memo. My question really was, for all the 99-point-something-per-cent output that is very high quality and unquestionable, is it not the case that if you really care about the future of the BBC, you really have to care about the zero-point-something per cent that goes wrong, taking that as absolutely seriously as it warrants?

Caroline Daniel

I agree with you. I think it is important, but I personally think that the BBC did take issues of impartiality and accuracy incredibly seriously. That is the reason why it is one of the most trusted news brands in the world.

Chair

Misinformation meltdown mosh pit.

Cameron Thomas

Mr Prescott, I happen to agree that this documentary aired a catalogue of interesting circumstances through such a large editorial process. My question is, prior to it airing, did that documentary deviate from the standard editorial or auditing processes in any way?

Michael Prescott

The short answer to that is that I don’t know. That is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping the BBC would look into.

Cameron Thomas

Who would know?

Michael Prescott

I guess your best witness will be your next one: the BBC chairman may know about that. I only know what I saw on the screen and then what David Grossman reported.

Cameron Thomas

I have just realised that you did not quite answer my earlier question. Do you agree that Donald Trump’s reputation has been tarnished by this documentary?

Michael Prescott

Probably not.

Cameron Thomas

You don’t agree with him. Thank you. Caroline, I have largely not spoken with you yet—apologies. Have you seen David Grossman’s report? Have you read it?

Caroline Daniel

Yes.

Cameron Thomas

Have you read Michael’s memo?

Caroline Daniel

Yes.

Cameron Thomas

Would you agree that Michael’s memo was an accurate reflection or response to that Grossman report?

Caroline Daniel

I would say that Michael’s memo does not provide a comprehensive view of what was in the David Grossman report.

Cameron Thomas

What do you think was missing?

Caroline Daniel

I think the David Grossman report covered a lot of ground: significant areas like the coverage of the election and the use of polling; issues like who was being represented on programmes; and issues of impartiality. There was obviously a BBC response to it as well, which was also significant. They did engage with each of the details of the David Grossman report. Michael’s account is a personal account rather than a comprehensive review of everything that was covered in the committee.

Cameron Thomas

Would you describe it as biased?

Caroline Daniel

I would not choose to characterise it that way. I think it is a personal account of what Michael wanted to bring before the board.

Michael Prescott

I think Caroline’s remarks may well be fair, because—I am very open about this, and I think I even say it in the memo—it was meant to be an edited take on things. It was a primer for the board, hoping to get some action. They could then go away and—as I think I urged them to do in the memo—look at the full Grossman report. I do not think I would ever claim that it was fully comprehensive; it was edited highlights, intended to get action.

Cameron Thomas

Is there anything else you would like to add in answer to that question, Caroline?

Caroline Daniel

No.

Jeff Smith

Caroline, you said that the memo does not provide a comprehensive review of the Grossman report. Do you think it gives an accurate sense of the Grossman report?

Caroline Daniel

I repeat what I just said: I think Michael’s review was not designed to be a comprehensive review of everything in the David Grossman report. When you read the David Grossman report in full, it is a broader reflection of the debate that the committee had about issues and anticipating issues in terms of both existing coverage—was there something we should be looking at more closely?—and whether there are actions that the BBC should be taking. My personal interpretation was that the BBC engaged with it, the executive team responded and actions were taken. It was going to be an ongoing issue; Donald Trump defines the news waves at the moment. It was an important issue to think ahead about how we cover Donald Trump appropriately. My takeaways were very much focused on that broader representative view. David Grossman’s reports were not supposed to be comprehensive. They were quick takes and ad hoc research to help fuel a conversation in the committee, rather than the thematic reviews, which are much bigger picture and longer term, included lots of interviews and comprehensive research, and looked at a much broader range of programmes.

Jeff Smith

To be clear, the Grossman reports were the only ones that were asked for by the committee on this particular topic—there were no others?

Caroline Daniel

No. In this case, no.

Jeff Smith

Michael, Dr Shah said that your memo is “a partial description of the evidence that EGSC received”. Is it fair to describe your memo as partial?

Michael Prescott

I don’t really think so. As I said, it was edited highlights intended to get action. I don’t know whether you want to call it partial or not.

Jeff Smith

Do you think it was impartial?

Michael Prescott

Well, there was nothing in it that would mislead the audience. I think it was a reasonable edit of all the areas concerned that arose out of the Grossman reports. In that sense, I suppose it would be fair, on the American one for example, to say that it is unbalanced, because I did not mention where David Grossman praised the coverage and I only mentioned where there were problems. I do not mean to sound arrogant, but I do not really apologise for that—it was 19 pages as it was, for one thing. If you do read the full Grossman report—I do not know whether you are getting hold of it—into the American election coverage, see what you make of it, but my plea is this: wherever the BBC earns a gold star, that is great, but that does not mean it should not take the problem seriously. The first thing there was that it broke its own guidelines on how to use opinion polls. What was done about that afterwards, how did that problem occur and what is being done about that to prevent an accidental reoccurrence? Answer: we do not know.

Jeff Smith

Would you agree that they have acknowledged that that was an issue? I am looking at a quote that says that it is “the one significant exception to our usually excellent record of reporting polling”. That particular problem with that particular poll was acknowledged.

Michael Prescott

Yes. I should have said, by the way, that I really welcome the BBC chairman’s letter to you, where he says he is going to go through everything in my memo point by point, which is, in a way, all I wanted. The one worry I still have is whether the BBC will do that, treating every issue there as if it is a systemic problem until they can prove that it is not. They say they have responded to and acknowledged the issue about the opinion polling; okay, but were there systems that went wrong? If it was one single human error on one night, fine, but if not, there is a bigger problem. What has gone wrong here? They need to get under the bonnet and start fiddling around with a spanner a bit.

Jeff Smith

How do they demonstrate that they have fixed those systemic problems?

Michael Prescott

For starters, whoever takes the place of Caroline and me on the standards committee, hopefully it can persuade them that it has been doing a more thorough job and, if there is to be wider scrutiny, it is for the BBC as an institution to figure that out. Of course, you as the Select Committee have an oversight role.

Mr Alaba

Michael, you made a comment about your communication being a primer for the board. You started off earlier by saying you were a strong supporter in your formative years and how important the BBC was. Many people in this room, myself included, think the BBC was very important to our education as well. Did you foresee the damage your memo would cause—

Michael Prescott

Absolutely not.

Mr Alaba

Sorry—I paused. My apologies. Did you not see a scenario in which that memo would be widely circulated?

Michael Prescott

No. As I say, it went to 14 members of the BBC board and then senior people at Ofcom and DCMS who, although the BBC is independent, have some role in terms of dialogue with the BBC. Also, looking back, what was I to do? I could have done nothing, but you can hopefully tell from the memo the level of my concern. I wanted someone, somewhere to start doing something.

Mr Alaba

I understand that, but you could argue that in some cases it has possibly been weaponised. You spoke about people on the political spectrum grasping it and trying to damage the BBC. I am just surprised that you are surprised that we have got to this point.

Michael Prescott

This is a personal view, but whether people at the BBC think this stuff has been weaponised or not, surely that is a secondary issue. There are very specific things that have been going wrong, detailed in the Grossman reports and in my memo. Now the BBC say they are going to look at them one by one. Hopefully they will treat them as systemic problems, in which case the BBC will end up stronger—and I want it stronger, so that it can conquer the globe. You say, “Surely you realise there was a risk of damage.” Even as I sit here now, my hope and my genuine belief is that the BBC is going to end up stronger because of all this stuff, and it will be great; they can reach billions on this planet with their news and current affairs, given that we are in the era of fake news, if they get this stuff right.

Mr Alaba

Caroline, what is your view of how this has impacted the organisation?

Caroline Daniel

It has obviously been an extremely challenging time for the BBC. It is in the spotlight on issues of impartiality, which in my view the BBC was actively engaging with on a regular basis. As I point out, the committee was extremely robust, discussions were had, research was commissioned on a regular basis—and it was challenging research. I think that is a really healthy organisation and a very healthy debate.

Mr Alaba

The terms “systemic” and “processes” were used and there was mention of the editorial team possibly not listening, and you gave some examples, one of which was the misrepresentation of an ethnic minority “penalty” in respect of insurance. The BBC acknowledged that that insurance story was wrong and published a correction in their 2024-25 annual report. Is that an example of the EGSC working as intended?

Michael Prescott

Well, as you know, there is a complaints process that occurs quite separately from the standards committee. Any member of the public can complain, and that is dealt with by certain machinery. The standards committee keeps on eye on that and sees what it thinks of it. On the particular story that you mentioned and the BBC apology, sorry for being a broken record, but this comes back to whether a problem is systemic or not. How did they get that so wrong? There were multiple levels of failure there, and I know of nowhere—it certainly did not come before the standards committee—that the BBC treated it as such and looked into every stage of failure and what they could learn from what went wrong.

Mr Alaba

Given the resolution of the insurance story, why did you not mention that, or reiterate it, in your memo?

Michael Prescott

The insurance story?

Mr Alaba

Yes.

Michael Prescott

It is in my memo.

Mr Alaba

Why did you not mention that the BBC had dealt with it?

Michael Prescott

Because the point I was trying to make to the board was the same one I am trying to make to you. I think I have run through the possible levels of editorial failure: “Who commissioned it? What did the programme editors make of it before it went out? Where was the professional scepticism over this claim?”. I was trying to make the point to the board that I think the BBC should look at that, among many others, as if it was a systemic problem, and I wanted them to support me in that notion.

Mr Alaba

Caroline, can you give me an example where the EGSC considered a subject that concerned you and reached a consensus that you were satisfied with?

Caroline Daniel

On the insurance article, action was taken. There was a debate at the board. It was embarrassing for the team, in terms of their understanding of data journalism, and further actions were taken, including more training within the BBC on understanding probability and having proper understanding of economics across some of the team. New people were also put in to the data science team. In my view, that counts as action, and significant action from the EGSC. If it had not come up in the EGSC, it would probably have come up via the editorial complaints unit, if there had been concerns. That is another part of our monitoring. It is not just the committee; the editorial complaints unit also has a significant role in looking at issues of inaccuracy. Another example is that we looked at the role of BBC Verify and issues of misinformation at the BBC. Are there issues, in terms of complaints coming in, that show that we should be concerned about whether reporters were falling for fake news. In my view, we should be spending a lot of time on those issues. Going forward, if I had one piece of advice for Chris Saul, it is that there should be longer, deeper dives into some of these really big, existential issues for the BBC’s journalism. It really matters to get that right, particularly in an era when trust is incredibly important, and when the internet is becoming a source of massive-scale misinformation. In my view, the BBC has engaged with that over the last three years, and we did have conversations about that. I would like to see the BBC focusing even more on that going forward, along with having a wider range of views and more and deeper dives on issues like that.

Mr Alaba

Okay; thank you. Michael, are there any other examples?

Michael Prescott

Of when the committee operated by consensus? In a funny way, in my mind it probably operated by consensus on almost everything. The glaring exception—of course, this is why we are all here—was the management’s response to some of David Grossman’s more critical findings. There was no consensus: the management went one way and some members of the committee remained unhappy with it. You can clearly see that I remained unhappy with it.

Mr Alaba

Thank you.

Natasha Irons

Given that there was an investigation into the insurance piece, action was taken and the BBC acknowledged there was an issue, how much was that a systemic issue? Or was it just a cock-up? It is conspiracy versus cock-up. Is it just that a mistake was made, the BBC investigated and it was corrected? Given that action was taken, why did you feel the need to put it into your memo?

Michael Prescott

To me, a journalistic error might be that I misspell someone’s name or get the date wrong. And of course errors occur—I do not want to come across as someone who thinks otherwise or is intolerant of the occasional human failure—but this report was way more than that. The BBC launched this service called Verify. The clue is in the name: it is supposed to be even better than your ordinary BBC in that you can check everything out and there is hard data. To launch Verify, that report was emblazoned across “BBC Breakfast”, “Lunchtime News, “BBC News at Six”—all the bulletins. This was a big deal at the BBC. This was, “We’ve got a shocking new exclusive for the world.” What went wrong surely cannot have been one person’s error. How did they have the notion to study this idea that insurance companies would be charging ethnic minority people more? Who compiled the report? Who checked it? Who edited it? Which output editor said it was okay? Of all the people across the BBC who heard that report, was there no professional scepticism? “Geez, we’d better have another look at that.” It was multiple levels of failure, and that is why I put it in the memo.

Natasha Irons

Caroline has just outlined that better training has been put in place for data analysis, because anyone can look at a spreadsheet and come up with an answer for anything. She has outlined the actions that were taken off the back of that clear failure. Where that has happened, is that not the BBC behaving in the way it should behave?

Michael Prescott

That is a great question. You have zeroed in on an area of potential continuing disagreement between me and the BBC—you will probably get more on this from the chairman. On that one, yes, they organised some retraining and had a look into their use of statistics. Feel free to disagree, but to me, that is just not enough. This was a horrendous and embarrassing error—and one that, by the way, could have damaged community relations in this country. If you are a black teenager sitting at home all day listening to that stuff, how would it make you feel? And it was all untrue. I think they should have had what you might call a full-on inquest, and I am not clear they ever did.

Chair

Can I talk to you about BBC Arabic? It comes in for some quite heavy criticism in your memo. We know that BBC Arabic has to apologise for around two articles a week at the moment. In answer to our letter, the BBC chairman said that they are determined to attempt to tackle the underlying problems identified by both the EGSC and Mr Prescott. Are those steps sufficient, Michael?

Michael Prescott

In my view, it depends on what he means by that, but I take him to be in good faith and am delighted by that promise. Vis-à-vis BBC Arabic, I alluded in the memo to how there have been some changes in personnel—a measure in which the director general seems to place great faith. My view is that switching out an editor or two is not enough. When you have got such a shocking catalogue of seeming errors, there must be more going on than just the editor, on that day, not being quite up to the job.

Dr Huq

We have established that for the two of you the role was advertised, but for the David Grossman role it was internal.

Michael Prescott

I think it was, but I am really not sure about the Grossman one. It is probably best to ask the Beeb.

Dr Huq

It just seems that the memo was very reliant on that one individual. You said to Jeff you didn’t entertain any other evidence. Surely, isn’t it incumbent on you to take evidence from a range of different sources? Throughout your time there was also the “Gaza: Doctors Under Attack” documentary, which a lot of staff were exercised about at the all-staff meeting. There were various other things that happened. The NUJ and BECTU have written to us. There are 21,000 members of BBC staff, hundreds of whom attend the all-staff meetings. Why was none of their evidence in your memo? Why was it all slanted to one individual and one political point of view?

Michael Prescott

You can’t boil the ocean, for one thing. My memo was what it was presented as being, which is a summary of internal reports that had come before the standards committee and not been acted on fully enough.

Dr Huq

Okay. I also wonder what your relationship is with these gentlemen—with Robbie Gibb. The FT says you are a friend of his. Can you clear that up for us? And with David Grossman?

Michael Prescott

David Grossman I know only through his appointment to this role and the standards committee. I have known Robbie Gibb for a number of years. I think I first met him when I was working briefly for the political staff of the Daily Mirror. He worked for BBC Westminster. So I do know Robbie Gibb, but you have got to appreciate that in 14 to 15 years working as a political correspondent, it is probably not an exaggeration to say I got to know hundreds of people on a cross-party basis. Even today, I have got dozens and dozens of friends from that period of my life, and I have got as many Labour party friends and Lib Dem friends as Conservative friends. But yes, I do know Robbie.

Dr Huq

Would you call him a friend? Because there are all these rumours swirling around.

Michael Prescott

Yes, I think that’s a fair description.

Dr Huq

Would you be prepared to publish the communications between the two of you in the lead up to the appointment and since the memo?

Michael Prescott

To the EGSC?

Dr Huq

To the Committee—to us.

Michael Prescott

Would I be prepared to publish what?

Dr Huq

Communications that you had in the run-up to getting the job—maybe to scotch the rumours that are out there—and since the memo was published. It mysteriously found its way to The Telegraph; nobody quite knows how.

Michael Prescott

On the first of your things—getting the job on the standards committee—that was openly advertised, and it was an open, competitive process. I am not sure quite what it is you are getting at there.

Dr Huq

The question was: would you publish communications that you had, such as emails and texts.

Michael Prescott

That is quite a precedent you are asking me to set. My last meeting of the standards committee was in June and I haven’t seen him since then. I have had one conversation with him since then, and that’s it.

Dr Huq

Okay, that is good to know.

Cameron Thomas

Mr Prescott, can you understand why somebody might find it suspicious that somebody who is described as a friend might have a role in that individual’s appointment?

Michael Prescott

That is a fair enough question.

Cameron Thomas

If that is a fair enough question, will you submit the documentation?

Michael Prescott

Like I said, it is quite a precedent to set. To answer your question directly, I applied for the standards committee position as described. You had to put in a written submission and then there was an interview. The interview panel was made up of four people, one of whom was from HR. Feel free to criticise me, but I just took the point of view, “Well, the BBC does do that sort of thing well. If BBC HR are involved, fine.”

Cameron Thomas

I am not criticising you. I am just suggesting that it is interesting that somebody you have described as a friend had a role in your appointment. Do you not think that that is unusual?

Michael Prescott

The thing is, if you operate in this country in the sphere of politics, the media and so on, it is not that unusual to come across people. It happens all the time. So unusual—well, I don’t know.

Chair

Michael, if even a memo warning about issues of impartiality has issues with selective quoting and perceptions of bias, is there any hope that anyone can ever be an effective and trusted arbiter of impartiality?

Michael Prescott

The BBC gets as close as any organisation in the world ever has, and I think it is achievable so long as you are open, transparent, honest and—in a sense, this is what this session is about, is it not?—willing to take it on the chin when you get it wrong, looking into what has gone wrong thoroughly and putting in a full programme of reform if needed. I think it is achievable enough. By the way, the BBC is the best-positioned organisation in the world to do that, even with everything we are discussing—in my view.

Chair

That brings us to an end. I thank you so much for appearing in front of us this afternoon and for all your time. Is there anything that either of you would like to conclude with before we end today?

Caroline Daniel

No.

Michael Prescott

I do not think so. I would just say a big thank you, because this has been all over the news for whatever it is—three weeks now. I have deliberately avoided the media for numerous reasons, but not least because I have great respect for Parliament. Also, in a session like this, you can go through things so much more thoroughly than in one media interview, so I am really appreciative.

Chair

We are very grateful to you both for coming in to see us this afternoon and for answering all our very many questions. Examination of witnesses

Witnesses

Dr Samir Shah, Sir Robbie Gibb and Caroline Thomson

Chair

We are back for our second panel: Dr Samir Shah, the chair of the BBC and of the BBC editorial guidelines and standards committee; Sir Robbie Gibb, a non-executive director of the BBC and a member of the BBC editorial guidelines and standards committee; and Caroline Thomson, a non-executive director of the BBC and also a member of the BBC editorial guidelines and standards committee. Thank you for appearing before us. You probably saw the first panel, so I will not repeat my introduction to the session; suffice it to say, Dr Shah, you are once again in front of us at a point when the BBC is said to be in crisis and when the board appears to be in crisis, too. You probably recall that when the Committee first met you, we were a little frustrated that you seemed unable to take a definitive stance on anything. We wanted you to give us strong, unequivocal answers. I want to make sure that we start off on the right foot today. Did the BBC block the head of news from apologising for the “Panorama” programme before 10 November?

Dr Shah

I will answer that question directly, but first, if I may, I will take this opportunity, to apologise to all the people who believe in the BBC, care for it, and wish it to survive and thrive. I apologise to the licence fee payer, who funds the BBC to deliver its mission. I apologise to the thousands of people who work for the BBC, to our staff who work with such dedication and commitment to deliver the output we all enjoy so much. I regret the mistakes that have been made and the impact that has had. I now come to the question that you asked, but may I ask you to repeat it for me, so that I can answer it directly?

Chair

Did you and the rest of the BBC board block the head of news from apologising for the “Panorama” programme on 10 November?

Dr Shah

To go back to the week in which the story broke in The Telegraph, you wrote to me, and I was writing the answer to you. I heard that news wanted to apologise for the splicing of the edit, with a white spark. I thought that was a necessary thing to do, but was not sufficient, because the fundamental issue here was the sequencing of the edit and the placing of the Proud Boys march. The real issue here was the impression left that President Trump, in his 6 January speech, had encouraged a call to violent action. What we had to apologise for was that, as well as for the splicing of the edit. It is my view that editing interviews is a normal journalistic practice, so that in itself is not what the problem was. The problem was the impression that it led to: an impression that President Trump had called for direct, violent action. That was not the case, and that is what I thought needed to be apologised for. The answer to your question is, I did not think it was adequate; I thought it was necessary, but not sufficient.

Chair

If you felt that that was the case, why was there no apology when David Grossman first brought that to your attention?

Dr Shah

Do you mean in the EGSC meetings from January and May?

Chair

Yes.

Dr Shah

That is a very fair question. Looking back, I think we should have made the decision earlier—in May, as it happens. In January, as you heard earlier, that report came about and the context was: how well do we review our own coverage? We do this constantly—how we did, what went well, what did not go well—and we examined how we cover the US elections as a general point. The report came back, as you have said, that the coverage was, on the whole, excellent, but that there were some real issues. At that meeting, there was also coverage of the Arabic service, which we may come back to. As is normal, I invited news to give me a formal response to that research. The response came in May. When that response came, there is one thing that I would like to make clear: this was a constructive discussion that took place at the EGSC. Some very important observations were made in that report, which the executives took on. For me, one of the most interesting ones was the recognition about the story selection idea. I have a letter in front of me on the news report—you have it—which said that “BBC infrastructure is wholly resourced in the Democratic areas” and that “we need to move into other parts of the US” to get a better sense of opinion within it. That is an action that is going to be taken, and there will be movement, so our resources tap into not just the Democratic heartlands, where in a way we have too many resources. We need to move that out. I give that example simply to tell you that this was not a discussion where we had a defensive news response to some very serious issues. That was that. When it came to the “Panorama” edit, there was a difference of opinion across the board. Looking back, I think it would have been better for us to pursue it then; I completely accept that. As we go into my understanding of how we got here, it seems to me that, along with editorial and governance, which are important issues that we will unpack, there is an issue about how quickly we respond, the speed of our response. Why do we not do it quickly enough? Why do we take so much time? This was another illustration of that. Clearly, we should have pursued it to the end and got to the bottom of it, not waited as we did, until it became a public discourse. I have a lot of things to say about my relationship with Mr Prescott, that report and what he did—

Chair

We have lots of questions to come on to along that line. What I am trying to get to is that there has been a lot of speculation in the media that it was the inaction and delay by the BBC board—the press has reported that there was a dispute in the BBC board—that caused so much of the drama ever since. I am really interested to know why it took so long. Why did you not get on the front foot? You should have got on the front foot, whether with an apology or a robust defence; either would have been an acceptable way of responding, but there was that huge delay. Why? What was causing the delay? What were your reasons for delaying?

Dr Shah

It seems to me that there were two timelines: one began with the EGSC report in January, and one was the week after the report was in some way leaked to the public by The Telegraph—do you mean that one?

Chair

As soon as The Telegraph started publishing the memo and its coverage of that, there was just a vacuum in the BBC for nearly a week, when no comment was given in any meaningful way to the substance of it. Why did you not get on the front foot with either an apology or some kind of defence of what had happened?

Dr Shah

Precisely because of the question you have just raised: I needed to understand what went wrong and to get the right answer. Getting the right answer was really important—

Chair

You knew what went wrong, because you had already had the Grossman report into this—

Dr Shah

No, no. I said that we reflected on it. In that week, I asked the director general to review the clip and whether there were any serious editorial breaches. There were. As an outcome of that, there was research that had to be done to get it right, and it took time to get it right, so we knew what the actual apology was for. I said, it was not just about the splicing, the editing; it was about the impression. That had to be done properly and investigated thoroughly. As well as that, I was writing a response to you from the board. I have 13 board members, and I needed to make sure that they were aware of what I was writing, and that I had their support. That did, I admit, take time. Of course, it will always be better to be able to get out quickly, but it is as important for me to get it right and to get it supported by the board.

Chair

If the BBC had responded quicker, do you think the resignations might not have happened?

Dr Shah

That is a hypothetical I cannot answer. All I will say is that I think the resignation of the CEO of news was a very honourable act. It was right of her to take responsibility for an error in her division. As she herself said, “the buck stops with me”. In public life, it is rare to find people who accept that something went wrong in their own division, who accept responsibility and who take responsibility. I applaud her for that.

Chair

Your culture and media editor, Katie Razzall, reported: “Deborah Turness became more and more angry and frustrated as the week went on because she was prevented by the Board from putting out that apology.” Was that in some way to blame for the fact that she then resigned from her post?

Dr Shah

You will have to ask her. I have already repeated that I thought the apology that was on the table was necessary, but not sufficient.

Chair

Did you try to stop her from resigning?

Dr Shah

I spoke to the director general about it. The resignation or otherwise, of the head of news is a matter for the director general, not for the board or for the chair. My job is to test and challenge the director general. Who he hires and who he does not hire underneath him is an operational editorial matter.

Chair

The director general resigned as well. Did you try to stop him from resigning?

Dr Shah

I did indeed, and I spent a great deal of time doing so. I do not think the director general should have resigned. I think that the act by the director of news was an honourable and proper act. I think she took responsibility, and I applaud her for doing so. I do not think that that meant that the director general also had to resign. However, when you read the director general’s reason for resigning, you see that certainly this was one factor, but he also said there were many other factors that led to it. I wish, and the board wishes, that the director general had not resigned. He had our full confidence throughout.

Cameron Thomas

At an organisation as large as the BBC, I imagine it should have occurred to you that you could have put out an initial statement while you were still trying to get to grips with the gravity of what had happened, prior to a full apology. Did you receive pressure from anybody on the board to delay such an apology?

Dr Shah

Absolutely not. We did put out a full statement, which, looking back, was rather vanilla, as corporate BBC tends to do. We did do it to hold because I needed to put out a fuller statement but I needed to be sure that I was right about what I was saying. This is a very, very important error, and I needed to make sure that what I was apologising for was fully sourced and fully right. It needed to be right, and it took its time.

Cameron Thomas

The resignation of the director general is quite a big deal, is it not? When you tried to dissuade Tim Davie from his resignation, how did that conversation go?

Dr Shah

I do not think it is right for me to discuss private conversations between me and the director general.

Cameron Thomas

It might be if the BBC is at stake.

Dr Shah

I think confidential conversations need to remain confidential, but let me answer your question. I have got to know Tim very well over the past 18 months. He is an outstanding director general. He is extraordinarily good. His energy, his dedication, his commitment to the BBC cannot be gainsaid.

Cameron Thomas

But his commitment was broken.

Dr Shah

As you know from his statement, he felt responsible as editor-in-chief for the error. My view is that responsibility was taken by the chief of news and that was proportionate.

Chair

May I take you back to the response to the Committee’s letter? On 4 November, you apologised on behalf of the BBC for the way that the Trump speech on 6 January was edited. Your words were, the BBC does “accept that the way the speech was edited did give the impression of a direct call for violent action. The BBC would like to apologise for that error of judgement.” Dr Shah, I have had a look at the BBC editorial guidelines. Section 3.4.25 of the BBC’s editorial policy states that, “For news, factual and some factual entertainment content, unless clearly signalled to the audience or using reconstructions, content makers should not normally…inter-cut shots and sequences if the resulting juxtaposition of material leads to a materially misleading impression of events.” It seems quite clear to me that the way that both “Newsnight” and “Panorama” edited this clip broke those BBC editorial guidelines. What I am trying to get to grips with is why it took a year to apologise for this failing, despite the EGSC, which you chair, voicing concerns about this programme on three separate occasions, and why no action was taken despite the fact that there was clear evidence of a breach of editorial guidelines.

Dr Shah

As I said, in the January meeting, that report came out. I then invited the news division to give me a formal response to it. That response took place in May. We discussed it then, and there was a different set of opinions around it. There was a plausible case for the edit, because the point of the programme was to deliver to the British audience; it was about the supporters of President Trump and what they were learning. There was a case, as it were, for the edit. This was discussed and debated and there was a difference of opinion. I have already said we should have pursued it further at that time, and by pursuing it further, we should have investigated it in detail with the people responsible in the BBC. You must remember that that is an operational matter and not a matter in governance terms for the non-execs, but it is a matter that we could have pursued harder, and we should have done. Had we done so, what you have just read out would have come out and there would have been a formal response that this was a breach, and we would have then taken on—

Chair

What was the tipping point that prompted your apology? Was it the 500 letters of complaint to the BBC? The resignation of the director general? Was it the memo? Or was it the threat of legal action from the President of the United States?

Dr Shah

I am sorry. Say that again—the last one.

Chair

The threat of legal action from the President of the United States. What was the tipping point for suddenly deciding that an apology would be forthcoming? The memo? The director general going? The letters of complaint? Or the threat of legal action from the President?

Dr Shah

As I wrote to you, when the memo entered public discourse, there were a lot of complaints about it. We decided at that moment to reflect on and review the decision, and that is when we came out with the outcome that, yes, it was a mistake, an error of judgment, and that is what I wrote to you.

Chair

Just to be clear, had this not been covered by the memo and prompted all these letters of complaint, it would never have risen back to the surface.

Dr Shah

It is worth noting that in May we discussed that there had been no complaints to the BBC News about this. If that had happened, we could have looked at it. As I said, there was a discussion at the board about this. There was a debate. Because there had been no formal complaints, we wrongly let it rest. As you probably all know, very soon after that I was uncomfortable with that outcome and that result. It was not the only reason; I had a number of things over the time I have been chair that I worried about—the workings of the committee, whether it was properly defined, whether the relationship with the main board was precise enough, with the terms of reference for the advisers, and whether the composition was good. I invited Chris Saul in June to look again. Long before this broke, I did think there were things to be done, and that process was under way. One of those things—maybe Caroline will talk about it—was what are the mechanics when there is disagreement within a board or at the committee? How do we deal with that in such a way that we do not cross that line between governance and editorial? It is an important line we hold, but it does seem to me that this has thrown up that question. As I said, one of the questions I have to face is what were the governance failures here? What were the process failures? I think we do need to find a way, and Caroline is going to be looking into that. I had started the work with Chris Saul and there were some interim findings. We were under way. As you know, I listened intently to your conversation with Mr Prescott. I met him several times during that period. I invited him to talk to Chris Saul and they met to discuss it. After the letter went out I talked to him again. After we met the board I talked to him and I said, “I would like you to be engaged in fixing what is wrong with the EGSC and how we can get it to a state where you won’t have cause to write such a letter again.” I did that and he seemed to rise to it. So we were going to carry on. This Committee should not think I ignored Mr Prescott. I did not. He raised some important questions that we need to answer. I have already said I do not think it was a rounded picture of what actually happened in the EGSC. You heard from your other witness that, in fact, the executive took many detailed actions. So it was not just a case of a report coming out and a defensive reaction. That is not an accurate account of what happened.

Chair

It was reported in the press quite a lot that the reason for the delay in the board responding to our letter, and indeed opining in any way on what had happened, was that there was a big difference of opinion at board level. Is that true?

Dr Shah

In May?

Chair

No, we are talking about recently in response to all the news that came out. You lost two very key, very senior members of the BBC team, and still we waited for you to say anything.

Dr Shah

At the board meeting in October when we discussed the memo, we discussed it at length. There was a certain repeating of what happened in the EGSC, but it was important we discussed it. There were some differences of opinion, but we did agree on the next step at that meeting. That next step was for me to go back to Mr Prescott, discuss his email to the board and invite him to be part of reviewing how the EGSC could work better, to which he agreed. Then, as we know, a few days later, it was all over the press.