The resignation of BBC director-general Tim Davie and news director Deborah Turness over the panoramic editing of US President Donald Trump’s 2021 speech has plunged Britain’s national broadcaster into one of its deepest crises in history.
But this scandal didn’t start with a single show or a single miscarriage of justice. Close to the heart of this crisis is Robbie Gibb, who has spent more than a decade shaping the BBC’s political coverage. He has zigzagged between the BBC and the Conservative government, promoting his own partisan projects that have distorted the company’s journalism on Brexit, Trump and, ultimately, Gaza.
I saw the impact for myself when the BBC delayed broadcasting our film and dropped it on doctors in Gaza. What is unfolding today is just the moment when a long-term pattern of interference is brought into full public view.
Gibb has long been such an important figure on the stage of British public life that it is a relief to now be named and discussed in public. Until the Panorama scandal and its triggering resignation, he faced little scrutiny outside of political and media circles. Now he has suddenly burst into the headlines and is the subject of heated debate on social media, trying to understand how one unelected person came to wield so much influence.
It is difficult to think of anyone within both Number 10 and the BBC who has had such a far-reaching impact on British national life without taking any responsibility. Mr Gibb is perhaps the most influential yet hidden supporter of Brexit politics, the Conservative Party and Israel, juggling two of the country’s most important institutions as head of the BBC’s Westminster team, number 10 news director and a crucial BBC director with influence over BBC News. Between these roles, there was little change in his leadership motivations or methods, only his strong belief that he was the only one who could draw the line and ensure impartiality against the overwhelmingly liberal, left-leaning BBC ‘Wokerati’. But in doing so, he destroyed that concept altogether, leading to the BBC’s current crisis, its billion dollar battle with Trump, and the collapse of the credibility of its Gaza coverage.
As editor of Channel 4 News from 2012 to 2022, I experienced Mr Gibb from the moment he was appointed press secretary in 2017. His instinct to manage political coverage in a way that advanced his political project was clear from the beginning. From the outset, he severely restricted Channel 4 News’ access to government ministers, but the BBC was free to use that access, reflecting the close relationships he forged while overseeing some of its political output. Mr Gibb was well known within the BBC as a long-standing supporter of Brexit, having worked for the Conservative Party from 1997 to 2002. Mr Gibb, who was ranked 10th on the BBC, appeared to be acting much the same as he was at the BBC. His direct control of output was replaced by negotiations over access, which helped him continue to shape British politics. And he had the entire BBC political staff on speed dial.
Relations soured in 2018 when Channel 4 News became the first broadcaster to cover the Windrush scandal. It has emerged that hundreds of black British nationals, most of whom arrived from the Caribbean more than 50 years ago, have been unfairly detained, deported and denied their legal rights. The scandal stems from policies implemented by Theresa May in her previous role as home secretary. As we continued to report the growing number of elderly victims, Gibb reacted furiously. He reportedly banned Channel 4 News from interviewing the prime minister and other ministers and told aides he “keeps going on and on about things no one cares about”.
He then extended that ban to the Conservative Party conference, excluding us from the traditional Prime Minister’s press conferences that have been allowed for decades. All other broadcasters, including the BBC, signed a letter warning that the ban would set a dangerous precedent. Mr Gibb’s former BBC colleague later approached me at a press conference and told me he was “going crazy, absolutely furious”.
Multiple BBC journalists told me at the time that Mr Gibb still effectively controlled parts of the BBC’s political reporting from No. 10, using his influence and long-standing relationships to decide what was covered and who had access to it. Many said they had difficulty distinguishing the BBC’s Gibb from Number 10’s Gibb, as he continued to exert influence over important decisions. One of the big advantages for No. 10 was Mr Gibb’s influence over the BBC’s post-Brexit coverage. Unlike Channel 4 News, which pursued the Vote Leave and the Cambridge Analytica investigation, the BBC chose not to retrospectively investigate what happened during the referendum. Several colleagues at the BBC later told me that the reluctance to scrutinize the referendum was not new, but reflected how Mr Gibb was acting in real time as he oversaw the BBC’s political output during the election period.
In 2019, we obtained emails sent between Aaron Banks, a major Brexit donor, and Gibb in the run-up to the referendum. The emails showed Mr Banks had complained to Mr Gibb about the BBC’s investigation into the withdrawal. The European Union has asked Gibb to intervene as it seeks to increase support within far-right online communities. The investigation was closed after Banks expressed concerns to Gibb. The BBC said the article did not meet its editorial standards, but a few weeks later similar findings were published in The Sunday Times. Mr Banks also told Mr Gibb that Nigel Farage was not appearing on the BBC often enough. In the months leading up to the referendum, Mr Farage appeared repeatedly on the broadcaster’s programmes.
In 2019, Boris Johnson appointed Gibb to the BBC board after he and Theresa May left No. 10, but the influential role was not intended to give Gibb any interference in day-to-day editorial decisions. Despite this, multiple allegations surfaced that he continued to do so, including attempting to block appointments, visiting newsrooms, and repeatedly engaging in editorial issues. In 2020, he took control of the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper, the Jewish Chronicle, on behalf of an undisclosed benefactor, long seen as the voice of Britain’s Jewish community, but since then the paper has taken a sharp rightward turn. Some of Israel’s most respected journalists have resigned following allegations that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was influencing reporting. All this happened while Mr Gibb, as the most experienced editorial voice on the BBC Board, wielded an increasingly dominant influence, despite the Board’s rules prohibiting direct editorial involvement. In Gibb’s case, old habits clearly ran into trouble.
After the horrific Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 and Israel’s relentless two-year assault on Gaza that flattened much of the Palestinian enclave and killed more than 70,000 people, including 20,000 children, I was told by multiple sources that Mr Gibb, as the most powerful editorial voice on the BBC board, had been pressuring BBC News over its Israel coverage from the start. The pressure came to a head in February, when the BBC stopped broadcasting the film Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone.
The film was an outside production and did not disclose that the narrator’s 13-year-old father was deputy agriculture minister in the Hamas-run Gaza government. In the aftermath, the BBC delayed our investigation into Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health system and the killing of more than 1,500 health workers, making a series of excuses and finally admitting that it would no longer run the health system while investigating another film. This was an unusual and unprecedented decision, effectively silencing and slowing their reporting. For the first time since we were released, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack is finally being broadcast on Channel 4 rather than the BBC.
I heard that the board, under Gibb’s influence, effectively forced Tim Davie and Deborah Turness to first obfuscate their position on our film, then demand significant changes, and finally announce that only three one-minute clips from our 65-minute investigation would be played in the press. The film was about hospitals being bombed and evacuated, doctors and medical workers and their families being targeted and killed, and hundreds of others being detained and tortured. The program had already been approved by the BBC and was later broadcast on Channel 4 and Mehdi Hasan’s new media platform Zeteo without any complaints. Since then, it has been nominated for many awards and is now starting to win them.
In the end, it appears that Davey and Turness fell not because they stood up to Gibb, but because they were too slow to react to the crisis created by Gibb’s world. After years of pressure and growing frustration with prejudice against Gaza, the misleading panoramic editing of Trump’s speech and their hesitant response to his legal and political onslaught was the final straw. Only Gibb knows whether he intended to put the BBC in a position where it could face a multibillion-dollar lawsuit from a sitting US president, but his influence and alliances were central to the decisions that led to it. And now, behind the cover of obscurity and under the guise of championing impartiality, Mr. Gibb’s decades-long mission to reshape the national broadcaster around his political agenda is finally being seen for what it is. That would be an absolute disaster for the BBC and for the people it serves.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
