The unravelling of Huw Edwards is a moment of deep trouble for the BBC, its most senior news managers and executives and the Director General himself. Edwards’s conviction on some of the most serious category charges of making indecent images of children via WhatsApp is a horrific story of a famous man, fallen into a trap of depravity and committing a crime with real victims.
It keeps happening. The Jimmy Savile case exposed the pandering of entertainment bosses to the whims of a man who was widely known to be exploitative, and who was posthumously shown to have used his fame and access to charities, hospitals, prisons and the BBC itself to abuse hundreds of youngsters.
That cost the reputations and the jobs of BBC bosses. The problem is that many of the underlying traits of the organisation in crisis mode do not look to have been fixed.
Try reading the convoluted nature of its statements, and for all the niceties of legal requirements and regard to Edwards’s mental health, it suggests an organisation which still cannot give a clear account of its own thought processes without sounding as if AI were spooling it out: “If at any point during the period Mr Edwards was employed by the BBC he had been charged, the BBC had determined it would act immediately to dismiss him.”
But the question is not “what would have happened if”. It is what happened when information was already available about serious allegations.
As someone who is proud to be on mic for the BBC pretty frequently as a freelancer (not least on BBC Radio 4’s Moral Maze), this is an especially depressing story of immorality and of power abused, with some very questionable calls made in dealing with it.
Having first dragged its feet in responding when the (admittedly complicated) tale of Edwards’s activities with a vulnerable young man were raised, it found itself talking about a run of the mill “exit” with discussions about what due salary and pay benefits should accrue.
One way or the other, it ended up giving someone arrested on indecency charges a pay rise of £40,000. Yes, there would have been a legal risk of treating Edwards differently to other colleagues in the pay band. But two courses (at least) suggest themselves: move faster to get Edwards off the payroll given that he has already brought the organisation into disrepute; or simply withhold the pay rise (the reason for awarding it at all is still poorly explained) and take the chance that Edwards would sue. In the circumstances, that looks unlikely.
Even without the hindsight of this week’s guilty plea by one of its best-known faces, the strategy seems to have been to minimise risk, to the detriment of the corporation’s reputation, which highlights a failure to anticipate events.
The balance between Edwards’s privacy on health grounds and public interest is a difficult one. But the BBC is not just in the position of “any other employer” in a tricky HR and legal situation. By dint of its licence fee model, there is a clear and defined public interest in how the case is handled, and a huge downside to not being clear enough about distancing itself from Edwards.
Crucially its top brass had a lot of time to focus on the “what to do about Huw” question, which was clearly an unfurling nightmare, and as one senior manager put it to me not long ago “topic number one” in a small group who knew about the charges, even when it was out of the news.
Inevitably, this opens big questions of judgment. When Edwards’s arrest was made known to the BBC, calculations about how to handle his remuneration while suspended needed to take a different track. Remember too that the results of an internal probe into allegations of his inappropriate behaviour towards younger male colleagues were never revealed, which also looks like a less than transparent reckoning. Kudos to Victoria Derbyshire at Newsnight for doggedly following up this story – though many colleagues blamed her for doing so.
The most damaging charge which will be laid at the management’s door is that an organisation which stands proudly for openness and truth, and gleefully holds others to account for fake news via BBC Verify, failed to anticipate the wrecking ball of damage the Edwards case would inflict on it.
Too much chumminess, too great a reverence for “national icons” and the BBC’s labyrinthine bureaucracy all figure here. The stomach-churning archive footage of Edwards performing at the BBC’s red-carpet Children in Need fundraiser down the years tell us that for all meetings about workplace culture, the inclusivity workshops and promotion of “trust ratings”, there have been epic failures and a lack of clarity.
The Edwards I knew socially was gregarious, gossipy, alluring and a tough newscaster. That long career and a wide circle of admirers led to a misplaced sympathy of the “poor Huw” variety, so when a tangled but fundamentally sordid story ended up in The Sun last year, they blamed a message carrier they disliked – and told us how sorry to be for a man who may well turn out to have done more damage to the BBC than all of its ideological foes combined.
By happenstance, my TV licence fee reminder threatening dire consequences if I refused to stump up the £169.50 sum arrived a couple of days before the Edwards verdict. It would be a bit odd if, as someone proud to work with many professionally brilliant, often long-suffering and seriously underpaid colleagues at BBC Radio 4 and assorted parishes, I objected to settling it quickly.
But a rising number of people are already switching off their debits, either in disgust or simply because they now feel they have an excuse for not stumping up, and this debacle will boost opposition to a mandatory levy.
No institution can be blamed for what it did not know about the darkest side of the lives of those who work there. The question is, how did they act once the many unpleasant truths started to show themselves? Not well at all.
Anne McElvoy is host of the Power Play podcast for POLITICO