When the sad but momentous news finally arrived, one morning in September 2022, the job of breaking it fell to Britain’s most respected broadcaster.
‘A few moments ago, Buckingham Palace announced the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second,’ declared a sombre Huw Edwards. ‘The Palace has just issued a statement. It says the Queen died peacefully at Balmoral this afternoon.’
The announcement was delivered with a flawless combination of calmness and authority, in the soft Welsh accent that had, during the course of a 40-year career, become the veteran BBC anchorman’s trademark.
Edwards was not only one of the most recognisable faces on television, but also the most trusted. He’d fronted a long succession of public events, from the Olympic Games and Trooping the Colour, to the Queen’s Diamond and Platinum Jubilees, the weddings of Princes William and Harry, and the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh in 2021.
The disgraced BBC News anchor leaves Westminster Magistrates’ Court after pleading guilty to making indecent images of children
His informed and dignified coverage of two subsequent State occasions — the Queen’s funeral and the subsequent King’s Coronation — would elevate him firmly to the status of national treasure.
With fame came great fortune, too. As the BBC’s highest-paid journalist, he was by 2017 earning an astonishing salary close to £500,000 a year. And while a gender pay crisis then forced him to take a 20 per cent cut, he soon bounced back.
In the most recent financial year, BBC records show that he managed to earn £475,000 for just 160 days of work.
Off screen, Edwards also managed to present himself as the very model of respectability.
Married for almost 30 years, to a TV producer named Vicky Flind, he’d raised three sons and two daughters at their comfortable home in Dulwich, South London.
On Songs Of Praise, he once talked earnestly of his work as vice-president of the National Churches Trust, adding that the family regularly attended Welsh churches in the capital, where they’d sing hymns and listen to sermons in his native language.
Yet in the darker reaches of his soul, Huw Edwards had for years been harbouring an ugly secret. For despite the outwardly-orthodox nature of the family life, he was in fact a sexual predator with an unhealthy interest in boys.
What’s more, around the time of the pandemic, he began pursuing a fateful series of risky and at times illicit relationships.
Details of his peccadillo started to trickle out last year, in the weeks after he fronted the Coronation, when it emerged that the star, now 62, had paid £35,000 to a vulnerable 17-year-old boy who he’d befriended online in 2020. The young man had been encouraged to exchange sexually explicit photographs with him.
In July, The Sun had carried an interview with the child’s distraught mother, who said the money funded her son’s ‘spiralling’ addiction to crack cocaine.
‘When I see him [Edwards] I feel sick,’ she said. ‘There were huge sums, hundreds or thousands of pounds at a time.
‘One time he had sent £5,000 in one lump. The money had been in exchange for sexually explicit photographs of my child.’
Veteran broadcaster Huw Edwards announces the death of Queen Elizabeth on BBC News
The woman, who hailed from South Wales, said she was told the presenter requested ‘performances’ and her child said they would ‘get their bits out’.
She said her son had gone from ‘a happy-go-lucky youngster to a ghost-like crack addict’ in three years. She said: ‘All I want is for this man to stop paying my child for sexual pictures and stop him funding my child’s drug habit.’
Initially, The Sun did not name Edwards in its front page coverage of the mother’s claims.
But his name soon began to trickle out on social media and within a couple of days wife Vicky, a producer on ITV’s Peston programme, issued a statement saying Huw had suffered a serious mental health episode and been admitted to hospital ‘where he will stay for the foreseeable future’. Though the Metropolitan Police declared that nothing illegal had occurred, details of several other liaisons soon emerged.
In one, a 23-year-old man he’d met on a gay dating site alleged that Edwards had broken lockdown rules to travel to meet him. In another, it was alleged that he’d sent a 17-year-old schoolboy ‘creepy’ messages with love heart and kiss emojis.
A third series of claims revolved around ‘suggestive’ and ‘inappropriate’ messages he’d allegedly sent to BBC employees — claims which he has not commented on.
The whole thing was enough to see him suspended by the corporation. And the scandal would soon escalate.
In November, Edwards was secretly arrested on suspicion of child sex abuse offences.
Yesterday morning, his downfall was completed at Westminster Magistrates’ Court, where he pleaded guilty to three charges relating to a set of images he had been sent via WhatsApp by Alex Williams, a 25-year-old child sex offender from Merthyr Tydfil with whom he’d struck up an online correspondence. During a 25-minute hearing, it emerged that the BBC stalwart had, between December 2020 and April 2022, been sent some 377 pornographic images by Williams, of which 41 depicted children and seven were classified as Category A, the most serious. The average age of minors in the pictures was between 13 and 15, but one child was aged between seven and nine.
Edwards appears to have been exposed after South Wales Police found messages to him on a phone seized from Williams, who was convicted of seven child sex abuse offences in March, for which he received a suspended sentence.
Yesterday’s fall from grace is deeply embarrassing for the BBC, which has yet to fully recover from the Jimmy Savile affair and must now decide whether it can use archive footage of old events that Edwards anchored.
The Corporation must also explain why it chose to keep him on its payroll from his suspension last July until April this year. Grotesquely, the £475,000 he pocketed for the year 2023/24 was an improvement on the £435,000 he earned the previous year when he wasn’t suspended.
Edwards has been married to TV producer Vicky Flind for almost 30 years, and the couple have five children together
Also in the firing line are a slew of Left-leaning public figures who rushed to defend this pillar of the liberal establishment when details of his deeply-exploitative (if apparently legal) relationship with the 17-year-old were made public by The Sun.
Blinded by their hatred of a title that didn’t reflect their partisan world-view, they seemed oblivious to the obvious public interest in a popular newspaper exposing the predatory behaviour of a powerful public figure.
Echoing the PR line coming from the presenter’s camp, they also blamed the affair for triggering a mental health crisis. Foremost among them is Owen Jones, The Guardian columnist and professional Corbynista, who at the time declared: ‘The Sun is a disgusting rag and they have to pay for what they’ve done to Huw Edwards.
‘They tried to destroy someone’s life with false claims of illegality involving a minor… they tried to construe consensual adult interactions as something sinister and tawdry.’
Then there was Alastair Campbell, who used the story to attack the Tories, in one of the great displays of misguided whataboutery of modern times.
In a TV interview, he asked: ‘Is it not a more serious scandal that a former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, who said he was going to hand over all of his Covid messages has not done so? Is that not really more serious than this with Huw Edwards?’
The former Labour spin doctor added: ‘The whole thing has become an absurd witch-hunt’ and called for the media to ‘look at themselves a bit in the coverage of this story’.
Jon Sopel, the broadcaster, also weighed in. He told Good Morning Britain: ‘There are a number of people in the tabloid Press and, dare I say it, in BBC News who need to give themselves a good, hard look in the mirror.’
Meanwhile, BBC colleague John Simpson called it a ‘purely personal tragedy for everyone involved’ while Channel 4 comedian Jonathan Pie issued an extraordinary televised rant about the excesses of the so-called ‘gutter Press’.
The most shameless attempt to weaponise things came, however, from Hacked Off, the lobby group which campaigns against popular newspapers. It pompously called on journalists to respect the ‘privacy’ of Edwards, saying: ‘Let’s remember there a [sic] real people — families, friends and the young person themselves — behind the tabloid sport of public shaming.’
These and other bloviating commentators — who were, it should be said, unaware that Edwards had committed a criminal offence — are the ones who really ought to ‘take a long, hard look in the mirror’ this morning.
As, perhaps, should the various organisations that have previously sought to frustrate efforts to scrutinise Edwards. One is the combative law firm Harbottle & Lewis, hired by him late last year and acting under his instructions, which fired off aggressive letters to news organisations suggesting that any speculation about his personal life would constitute an invasion of privacy.
The police, too, are culpable for keeping his arrest secret, as is the Crown Prosecution Service, which for some reason chose not to publicly announce that he’d been charged for more than a month, meaning that news of the impending court case only trickled out last week.
A former Attorney General told The Daily Telegraph that the CPS decision was ‘very puzzling,’ and not ‘in accordance with’ the principles of open justice.
The lion’s share of the guilt must, of course, lie with Edwards, who had spent years cultivating an image that he himself described as ‘rather sombre and serious’.
Born in Bridgend, he was raised in a village near Llanelli by his stern father Hywel, a teacher who later became professor of Welsh literature at Swansea University, and mother Aerona, who was also a teacher.
A gifted child, who attained grade eight at piano, he studied French at Cardiff University, where he later became an honorary professor in the School of Journalism, Media and Culture, before taking a year out in the early 1980s to live in France.
Chillingly, given what we now know, he was employed as a teaching assistant in the town of Neufchateau in the Vosges region of France.
‘Everyone knew each other. I was known as “le Gallois” [the Welshman] — but only after I’d spent weeks correcting people who’d been calling me “l’Anglais”,’ he once recalled.
The news anchor had a 40-year career at the BBC before he left the Corporation in April
After a stint in commercial radio at Swansea, he joined the BBC as a trainee in 1984 and within a few years had been made a political correspondent for BBC Wales (at the age of 25, he was the youngest in the Corporation’s history). Then, in the 1990s, he became a newsreader on the Six O’Clock News.
Roger Mosey, who was head of BBC Television News when Edwards was promoted to ‘The Six’, once said: ‘I like him hugely.
‘If you’re a news presenter, you are not known as a stand-up comedian or someone who brings the house down [but] he’s very funny, quite gossipy and a witty guy to be with.’
Not everyone was quite so keen. Viewers wrote in saying he should go back to Wales. Prominent media figures argued his strong accent was ‘inappropriate’ for a frontline news bulletin.
Either way, the role, on what was then the nation’s most watched news programme, made him a household name.
And when, in 2010, he was chosen to anchor the wedding of Prince William, his reputation as ‘the country’s new master of ceremony’ was cemented.
Though his private life remained something of an enigma, Edwards opened up in a 2021 documentary, when he revealed a decades-long struggle with depression and told how he’d resorted to comfort-eating after failing to come to terms with the death of his father 11 years earlier, at the age of 75.
Edwards’ weight had ballooned to 16 and a half stone as he used food as a drug to numb his grief. ‘It was a proper kind of depression,’ he said. ‘I felt it had become rather overwhelming.
‘The worst thing was I felt I couldn’t do anything about anything. I felt a bit helpless.’
He never processed the bereavement until an epiphany in 2017, he said, when he realised his own health was at risk: ‘By 2016-17, I had put on a lot of weight. I felt dreadful. I mean, physically… I’d eat when I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t doing any fitness. I was grazing, watching telly and eating stuff, even though I didn’t need it.’
He took up boxing and running, as suggested by his wife, charting his progress on social media as he shed three stone.
Newly trim, he was described as a ‘silver fox’ by some ladies of a certain age.
Not any more. Indeed, he has now separated from Vicky.
Wearing dark glasses and flanked by police officers yesterday Edwards (who will be sentenced in September) looked every bit the fallen man.
His disgrace is now total.