Once the feeding frenzy is over, this is what we’re always left with. Families shattered, lives ruined and a thin, greasy feeling of shame descending over all who got caught up in the heat of the moment.
The worst-kept secret of the week is out, for whatever that is worth. We all know now that the anonymous BBC presenter accused by the Sun of paying for sexually explicit images was Huw Edwards, the corporation’s weighty anchor, in every sense of the word: the reassuring face and voice of every great state occasion, from election night to the death of a monarch.
Shortly after the police declared there was no evidence that he had actually done anything illegal – raising serious questions about how that story ever came to be published – Edwards’s wife, Vicky Flind, took the courageous decision to name him, disclosing that he had been hospitalised with a serious resurgence of the mental health problems from which he had previously suffered, and appealing for the hounds to be called off. The couple have five grown-up children, whose distress can only be imagined – as can that of other broadcasters wrongly dragged through the mud in the reckless social media guessing game that inevitably followed the Sun’s original, anonymised story.
But there is another vulnerable family here, too, who say they approached the paper in a desperate attempt to stop their 20-year-old child funding a crack habit by selling explicit images online; who had, they claim, already tried and failed to raise the alarm at the BBC. The young person disputes this account. But whoever is telling the truth, an obviously sad and sensitive family situation is rarely best served by pitching everyone into the middle of a war between the rightwing press and the BBC. Not for the first time, the trail of broken people leads directly to my own industry’s door. But awkwardly for those now calling on the ghouls to just leave Edwards alone, it doesn’t quite end there.
At least three current and former BBC employees have now complained of receiving what they considered inappropriate private messages from Edwards that left them feeling uncomfortable, but which they felt unable to report. One was a comment on their looks that prompted a “cold shudder”, according to Newsnight’s Victoria Derbyshire. Another had never met Edwards but got a late-night message complete with kisses.
There is talk of a newsroom culture where juniors were afraid that complaining would damage their careers, something that goes well beyond one individual case. There may have been no crime, but that does not necessarily mean the BBC’s internal investigation will find no victims. Did so many lives have to be smashed, however, to reach this point?
The Sun surely has the most immediate questions to answer. Backpedalling furiously, the paper now insists that it never alleged criminality in the Edwards case, despite initially accusing him paying a 17-year-old for sexual images (potentially a criminal offence). But what were readers meant to make of headlines suggesting he could face “years in prison”? After the Metropolitan police knocked that idea down, what’s left looks like a clumsy midlife blunder through contemporary dating app culture, where it’s far from clear who, if anyone, was exploiting whom. Embarrassing, but hardly damning.
Lucy Frazer, the new culture secretary, can expect some tough questions about regulation of both the established press and social media platforms that failed to stop their users recklessly libelling various household names once the story broke. But don’t hold your breath, this close to a general election, for anything to come of that.
Next to apologise should surely be the Conservative party deputy chairman, Lee Anderson, who branded the BBC a “safe haven for perverts” days after his own colleague Chris Pincher was formally recommended for suspension over groping allegations. Since 2019, two former Tory MPs have been convicted of sexual assault and another remains under investigation for rape. Pots would be well advised to reflect on their own appearance before attacking kettles. Which is why, of course, the BBC has devoted quite such a maddening amount of airtime this week to investigating itself.
Tortuous as it is to turn on the news and hear the BBC earnestly interrogating the BBC, rather than the Nato summit or Boris Johnson’s mysterious failure to produce evidence requested by the Covid-19 inquiry, there’s still a kind of mad nobility to it. What other organisation under intense commercial and political pressure would respond to a crisis not by seeking a superinjunction, but letting staff challenge their bosses’ version of events in full view of the customers? You’re unlikely to see the Sun turning over its pages to a rueful postmortem. And when outraged Tory women complained in a private meeting of a male MP openly watching porn on his phone in parliament, the response was a lecture on the dangers of attacking your own side.
Some may think the BBC naive, prone to falling feebly into its opponents’ traps. But are we really going to attack it for failing to organise a proper cover-up? The BBC cannot credibly cover failings in any other walk of life if it isn’t prepared to acknowledge its own. The caveat, however, if its staff are to endure this level of public scrutiny, is that the corporation must be crystal clear in advance about what’s expected of them.
In theory, it shouldn’t matter what the onscreen talent gets up to outside work, if it’s consensual and legal. This isn’t the 1980s, when the BBC sacked Frank Bough for allegedly taking cocaine and partying with prostitutes. A chaotic private life, an extramarital fling or a midlife decision to come out of the closet, as Phillip Schofield did in 2020, shouldn’t be a deal breaker now. But new sins have replaced old ones, and chief among them is the perceived abuse of power. Creeping into the DMs of young women desperate to break into your industry, for example, rings alarm bells now. So does the kind of bombastic office manner that a generation ago would not have been called bullying. Anyone senior enough to have worked their way to the top may have trained in a different world, and needs to understand that the goalposts have well and truly moved.
This has been a hard week for everyone who cherishes a national broadcaster operating without fear or favour, and hardest of all on the BBC itself. It’s tough to be held to standards others are not, and more distressing still to witness the human costs of that. But the BBC can emerge from this stronger, not weaker, if it makes a virtue of transparency. There is no future, in the end, for a news organisation incapable of facing the truth.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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