The BBC is the biggest prize in the information war – and the right may be about to destroy it

In a better world we would never have heard of Michael Prescott’s memo about the BBC. Prescott, a PR man and former Sunday Times journalist, was appointed as an independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board in 2022. This summer, he turned in an 8,000-word anthology of rightwing grievances. Among other things, Prescott claimed that the BBC was too critical of “British colonial racism, slave-trading and its legacy”, released too few push alerts about refugees, and ran too many positive stories about trans people.

Though described in the press as a “secret internal report,” the memo is just one man’s opinion – the kind of crank diatribe that used to be written in green ink and filed in the bin. Yet, because everything is stupid, it has triggered the resignations of director general Tim Davie and BBC News CEO Deborah Turness.

The fiasco began a week ago when Prescott’s document was leaked to the Daily Telegraph, which focused on one gripe in particular: the fact that an episode of Panorama spliced together two separate chunks of President Trump’s speech to his supporters on 6 January 2021, making it seem as if he was urging them to storm the Capitol and cueing up one of the most blatantly anti-democratic events in US history.

While Panorama should have made the edit clearer, the truth is that Trump did indeed tell his supporters that the 2020 election had been stolen and did indeed spur them to block Congress from certifying the results. He was, you may remember, impeached for this. He proceeded to valorise the rioters as political prisoners and, when he could, pardon them. So the message conveyed by the montage was fundamentally true. It is worth nothing that the episode inspired precisely zero complaints when it was broadcast last October.

It is not entirely clear why the BBC did not issue an apology as soon as the Telegraph story broke. Some say that the news team was divided over whether one was necessary, but Turness believed it was. Sources claim that the BBC board demanded a more fulsome mea culpa about the corporation’s alleged leftwing bias. Turness refused. The BBC remained silent. Outrage mounted – from the press, the White House, Nigel Farage and disgraced former prime minister Boris Johnson. Davie, who was reportedly planning his exit anyway, appears to have lacked the will to fight. This week, the BBC was decapitated. Trump predictably threatened to sue the corporation (ie, licence fee-payers) for $1bn.

Just typing up this chain of events makes me feel like I’m recounting a bad dream. If the BBC were sensibly governed, it would be inconceivable that a single edit would precipitate resignations at the very top. The real scandal here is the behaviour of the board. As Patrick Barwise and Peter York detailed in their 2020 book The War on the BBC, the British right has been trying to cow and weaken the BBC for decades, for both political and commercial reasons. But this time is different because the chief saboteurs were board members, chiefly Sir Robbie Gibb. On the Today programme, former Sun editor David Yelland justifiably described this week’s events as “nothing short of a coup”. The call is coming from inside the house.

Plainly stating the facts about Gibb makes you sound like a conspiracy theorist. The brother of former Tory MP Nick Gibb, he went from being a BBC researcher to chief of staff for another Tory MP, Francis Maude, to editing shows such as Newsnight and Daily Politics. In 2017, he left to become director of communications for Theresa May. He was one of the founders of GB News and led the opaquely funded consortium that purchased the Jewish Chronicle and made it radically more rightwing. In 2021, Boris Johnson appointed him to the BBC board as a non-executive director. This self-described “Thatcherite Conservative”, laughably, is the man who oversees the Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board: its so-called “impartiality czar”. According to the Guardian, it was Gibb who appointed his friend and fellow traveller Michael Prescott to compile evidence of the BBC’s leftwing bias.

Deliberately or not, the right regards its own prejudices and bugbears as the commonsense consensus of the British public and considers all opinions to their left to be toxic ideological extremism – what former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre notoriously called “cultural Marxism”. Before his BBC appointment, Gibb wrote in the Telegraph (in 2020): “The BBC has been culturally captured by the woke-dominated groupthink of some of its own staff.” Was it captured by conservatism when he was employed there? He did not say.

Everyone’s a critic when it comes to the BBC. Somebody on the left could assemble a mirror image of Prescott’s document, providing evidence that the BBC’s institutional bias is actually anti-trans, pro-Israel, and so on. But the left does not have a powerful network of media outlets, thinktanks and politicians to press its case. Nobody at the BBC is sweating about displeasing Zack Polanski or the Guardian or even the current prime minister. “There is terror of the right in a way the BBC does not possess of liberalism or the left,” wrote the broadcaster and former Newsnight policy editor Lewis Goodall in a scathing Substack post.

The effect of the right’s psychological warfare has been to make the BBC confuse genuine impartiality with the appearance of balance. At its worst, this produces a neurotic both-sidesism that is not just bland but untruthful. Tim Davie, a former Conservative activist, made things worse by publicly accepting the lie that the BBC has a liberal bias. Turness, too, seemed to bend over backwards to reassure the populists, the transphobes and the immigrant-bashers. Their appeasement has failed catastrophically because it could never have succeeded. Nothing encourages a bully like allowing yourself to be bullied.

The BBC remains the world’s most trusted news source. It informs exponentially more people than any of the newspapers that despise it. That is why every editorial decision it makes is a potential controversy but also why it matters so much. Anyone on the left who prays for its downfall has a death wish. As the recent purchase of CBS News by the Trump-friendly billionaire David Ellison proves, privately owned broadcasters can always be bought and turned into propaganda engines. The BBC, for all its flaws and mistakes and questionable hiring decisions, can never be that, which is why the rightwing populists seek to destroy it. It is the biggest prize in the information war.

One of the foundational errors this Labour government made was passively inheriting a slate of Tory appointees to public bodies, including the BBC, but I think Gibb has badly overplayed his hand. Culture secretary Lisa Nandy now has a choice. She can continue to allow the BBC to be sabotaged by rightwing activists who despise, among other things, the Labour party. Or she can, as far as her powers allow, wrest the corporation back from the pernicious influence of people like Gibb, strengthen its independence, and let the BBC breathe again.

Dorian Lynskey is a journalist, broadcaster and author who co-hosts the politics podcast Origin Story (and previously co-presented Remainiacs). His 2019 book The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 was longlisted for both the Baillie Gifford and Orwell Prize. Dorian reviews theatre for the Nerve.