The man who destroyed the BBC | policy

Resignations shake the BBC and reveal the depth of the crisis

Resignation of BBC Director General Tim Davie and Director of News Deborah Torrens; Due to an edit in the Panorama program on a speech by US President Donald Trump dating back to 2021, the national broadcaster in the United Kingdom was plunged into one of the deepest crises in its history.

But the scandal did not start with one program or one miscalculation. Close to the center of this crisis is Robbie Gibb, the man who has spent more than a decade shaping the BBC’s political coverage, moving between the corporation and the Conservative government, while pushing his own partisan project that has distorted establishment journalism on Brexit, Trump, and ultimately Gaza.

Robbie Gibb has been such an influential figure in the shadows of UK public life for so long that even being named publicly today and discussed is a relief. Even the Panorama scandal and the resignations that sparked it were rarely subject to scrutiny outside political and media circles. But now it is suddenly at the top of the headlines and the subject of heated debate on social media, as people try to understand how an unelected person was able to have so much influence.

Robbie Gibb: A hidden influence reshaping British media and politics

It is difficult to find another person who has exerted such a wide influence on public life in Britain without any accountability, from within the Prime Minister’s Office No. 10 and from within the BBC. Gibb was perhaps the most influential – albeit hidden – hand in the politics of Brexit, the Conservative Party and Israel, as he moved between two of the country’s most important institutions: head of the BBC’s Westminster team, then head of media in the Prime Minister’s Office, then becoming a pivotal member of the BBC’s board of directors directly influencing its news.

There was no significant change in his motivations or work style between these positions; He was driven by a firm conviction that he alone was capable of standing up to what he saw as a dominant left-wing and liberal “woke elitism” within the BBC, and ensuring neutrality. But in trying, he has destroyed any real concept of neutrality, leading to the current crisis at the BBC, the billion-dollar battle with Trump, and the severe collapse in the credibility of its Gaza coverage.

Only Gebe knows whether he deliberately pushed the BBC into the position where it now faces a potentially billion-dollar lawsuit from a sitting US president, but his influence and alliances were at the heart of the series of decisions that led to it.

The erosion of neutrality within the BBC and the overlapping of party influence

As Editor-in-Chief of Channel 4 News between 2012 and 2022, I had experience with Gaib from the moment he was appointed Press Secretary at Number 10 in 2017. His penchant for managing political coverage in ways that served his own political project was clear from the start. From the first moment, he severely restricted Channel 4 News’ access to government ministers, while this access remained freely available to the BBC, a reflection of the close relationships he had built during years spent supervising parts of the channel’s political coverage. Gibb was known within the BBC for his long-standing support for Brexit, a cause he had championed since working for the Conservative Party between 1997 and 2002. His behavior in the Prime Minister’s Office towards the BBC was not much different from his behavior during his years at the channel. He replaced direct control over content with compromise over access, allowing him to continue to shape British policy. He had the numbers of everyone working in the BBC’s political department on speed dial.

Relations deteriorated in 2018 when Channel 4 News became the first station to broadcast coverage of the Windrush scandal. It emerged that hundreds of black British citizens, most of whom arrived from the Caribbean more than 50 years ago, had been wrongly arrested, deported, and deprived of their legal rights.

The scandal was the result of policies implemented by Theresa May in her previous role as Home Secretary. As we continued to cover the growing number of elderly victims, Gibb’s response was violent. He banned Channel 4 News from interviewing the Prime Minister and other ministers, and reportedly told aides that we were “talking nonstop about something no one cares about.”

This ban was then extended to the Conservative Party conference, preventing us from participating in the traditional round of interviews with the Prime Minister, a practice that has continued for decades. All other broadcasters, including the BBC, have signed a letter warning that the ban creates a dangerous precedent. A former colleague of Gaib’s from the BBC approached me during the conference and said: “He is boiling with anger, he is at the peak of his dissatisfaction.”

Several BBC journalists told me at the time that in practice Gibb was still directing parts of the BBC’s political coverage from within Downing Street, using his influence and years of connections to determine what was covered and who was allowed access.

Many said that they had difficulty distinguishing between an absence at the BBC and an absence at the Prime Minister’s Office. Because he continued to influence fundamental decisions. One of the most important features of his presence in the Prime Minister’s Office was his influence on the BBC’s coverage of the post-Brexit period.

The BBC chose not to look back or investigate what happened during the referendum, unlike Channel 4 News which pursued the Vote Leave and Cambridge Analytica investigations. A number of BBC colleagues later told me that this reluctance to scrutinize the referendum was not new, but rather reflected the way Gibb worked in real time when he oversaw political content for the BBC during the campaign itself.

In 2019, we obtained emails between Arron Banks, the major funder of the Leave campaign, and Ben Gibb, sent ahead of the referendum. The messages showed that Banks complained to Gibb about a BBC investigation into EU attempts to build support within far-right online communities, and asked Gibb to intervene. After Banks raised his concerns with Gibb, the investigation was dropped. The BBC said the story did not meet editorial standards, but weeks later, the same investigation was published in the Sunday Times.

Aaron Banks also told Gabe at the time that Nigel Farage was not appearing enough on the BBC. In the months leading up to the referendum, Farage began appearing repeatedly across the corporation’s various broadcast platforms.

In 2019, after Gibb left the Prime Minister’s Office as Number 10 with Theresa May, Boris Johnson appointed him a member of the BBC’s board of directors, an influential position that is not supposed to interfere in day-to-day editorial decisions. However, numerous allegations emerged that he continued to do so, including attempts to obstruct appointments, his frequent visits to newsrooms, and his continued interference in editorial matters.

In 2020, he took a controlling stake in the Jewish Journal – the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper, which has long been considered the voice of Britain’s Jewish community – on behalf of unnamed financiers, and then moved the paper sharply to the right. A number of its most prominent journalists have resigned amid allegations that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was influencing its coverage.

All this happened while Gibb, as the most senior editorial officer on the BBC board, exercised – according to the allegations – increasing influence and dominance, despite rules prohibiting board members from direct editorial interference. In absentia, it seems clear that old habits do not die easily.

The crisis is worsening: from Brexit to Gaza, Panorama and Trump

After the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the ongoing two-year Israeli assault on Gaza, which devastated most of the Palestinian enclave and killed more than 70,000 people, including 20,000 children, a number of sources told me that Gibb, as the most powerful editorial voice within the BBC board, had been putting pressure on the BBC’s news department over its coverage of Israel from day one.

These pressures reached their peak in February, when the BBC broadcast, then withdrew, the film Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone. Subsequently, the BBC postponed our investigation into Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system and the killing of more than 1,500 medical workers. The commission presented a series of justifications, before finally admitting that it would not broadcast the investigation while reviewing the other film.

It was an exceptional and unprecedented decision, which effectively silenced and diluted their coverage of the topic. After we revealed the matter to the public, the film Gaza: Doctors Under Attack was broadcast, but not on the BBC, but on Channel 4 News.

I was told that the board, under unseen influence, had Tim Davie and Deborah Terness practically hide first their position on our film, then demand that we make fundamental changes to it, before finally informing us that the BBC would broadcast only three one-minute segments of our 65-minute investigation across its news platforms.

This film was about the bombing and evacuation of hospitals, the targeting and killing of doctors, paramedics and their families, and the arrest and torture of hundreds of others. It had previously received editorial approval within the BBC, and was later broadcast on Channel 4 News, as well as on Mehdi Hassan’s new platform Zeteo, without any complaints being registered.

Since then, the film has been nominated for numerous awards, and is now actually starting to win them.

In the end, it seems that Davy and Terence did not fall not because they stood up to Gebe, but because they dealt too slowly with the crisis that Gebe’s world helped create. After years of sustained pressure over Gaza coverage, and mounting complaints of bias, Panorama’s misleading montage of Trump’s speech, and their hesitant response to the legal and political attack that followed, was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Only Gebe knows whether he deliberately pushed the BBC into the position where it now faces a lawsuit worth up to a billion dollars from a sitting US president, but his influence and alliances were at the heart of the series of decisions that led to it.

Now, as Gibb hides, his decades-long mission to reshape the National Broadcasting Corporation according to his own political agenda, disguised under the slogan “defend neutrality”, can finally be seen for what it really is: an absolute disaster for the BBC and for the public it exists to serve.