The head of the culture select committee has questioned whether the BBC board is in “good hands” under its chairman Samir Shah, describing his testimony to MPs on Monday as “hesitant”.
Shah appeared before the Commons committee after a turbulent period for the BBC, which saw its director general and head of news resign following claims of impartiality in his reporting.
Speaking to BBC’s World Tonight after the hearing, Dame Caroline Dinenage, the most senior MP on the committee, said she was concerned about the lack of “control at the heart of BBC governance”.
Shah told the House of Commons committee that he would not leave the job, saying he would “steady the ship” and “fix it.”
Shah and other senior figures at the BBC were called to testify about how the corporation is addressing concerns raised about impartiality in its news coverage.
The dispute was sparked by the leak of a memo written by a former independent adviser on editorial standards, which included criticism of how the Panorama program edited a speech by Donald Trump.
The fallout has been the resignation of two of the BBC’s most senior leaders, the US president threatening to sue, and fresh pressure on the organization from senior politicians in the UK.
Asked about the assurances Shah gave the committee, Conservative MP Dame Caroline said: “I didn’t really have direct answers on the questions of how to get the BBC to act quicker, more decisively… we were really looking for hard evidence that the BBC board is going to deal with this… I’m not entirely convinced that they can and will.”
Asked about Shah’s position, he said: “The BBC cannot be left without a [director general] and without a chair, someone needs to be there to lead the way to replace the leaders.
“But I also don’t think we, as a committee, were very enthusiastic about the board being in good hands.”
He continued: “We are going to need much stronger answers to questions like the ones we posed today… it was all very uncertain… there wasn’t a great sense that there was control at the heart of BBC governance.”
Shah told the committee that he had begun a search for a new CEO and wanted to create a deputy position because the job was “too big for one person.”
He also told the committee that the BBC had been too slow to respond to the controversy over how Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech had been edited.
In that speech, Trump said, “We’re going to walk to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators, congressmen and women.”
More than 50 minutes into the speech, he said: “And we fought. We fought like hell.”
On the show Panorama, the clip shows him saying, “We’re going to walk to the Capitol… and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
The BBC apologized for the edit after the leaked memo sparked public scrutiny and criticism from the White House more than a year after it was first broadcast.
The corporation later said it had given “the wrong impression [Trump] had made a direct call for violent action,” but Shah said Monday that he had taken too long to do so because of an internal dispute over the wording and nature of the apology.
He told the committee: “It took time to understand what the real reason for the apology was.”
While the BBC apologized for the editing, it strongly rejected Trump’s position that he has grounds to sue the corporation for defamation and said it would not pay the financial compensation that the president’s lawyers had demanded.
The leaked memo was written by Michael Prescott, who previously acted as an external adviser to the BBC on editorial matters.
He claimed there had been “systemic” failings on a range of issues, including accusations of bias in the way BBC Arabic had covered the Israel-Gaza conflict and in the BBC’s coverage of trans issues.
Giving evidence to the same committee, Prescott said he believed problems were “getting worse” at the BBC, and that the board was “not taking things as seriously as I had hoped”, although he added that he did not believe the organization was “institutionally biased”.
Monday’s hearing also heard evidence from other senior figures connected to the BBC. His evidence included:
- Board member Sir Robbie Gibb, a former BBC editor and Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May’s former communications director, rejected accusations that he had orchestrated a politically motivated coup against the director-general and head of news as “complete nonsense”.
- Caroline Thomson told MPs that BBC News had argued Trump’s edit was “justified” but not “transparent enough”, while the board found it “misleading”.
- Caroline Daniel, another former external editorial adviser, said there had been “intense debate” about some issues within the BBC and described the leaked memo as Prescott’s “personal account”.
In an email sent to staff on Monday, Shah said hiring a new director general, the top job at the BBC, to replace Tim Davie would be a “top priority” for him in the coming months.
He said work was underway to assess whether the measures taken in response to the issues raised in the leaked memo were “appropriate” or whether “additional measures are required.”
Shah also said a review would be carried out into how the BBC’s Editorial Standards and Guidelines Committee operates, to ensure it has the necessary powers, represents a “wide range of voices” and is accountable.
Both Davie and news chief Deborah Turness, who resigned within hours of each other in an unprecedented reshuffle at the top of the BBC, rejected any systemic bias in the corporation’s reporting.
