Huw knows what happened

The Sun's crowing over a story that fell apart and the BBC thinks it can just move on...

Previously: Observing The Spectator's Lowest Life
Lloyd Evan's grim column is another entry into the magazine's annals of awfulness.

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Huw Edwards has today resigned and left the BBC. After 40 years of service, Huw has explained that his decision was made on the basis of medical advice from his doctors. The BBC has accepted his resignation which it believes will allow all parties to move forward. We don't believe it appropriate to comment further.

The BBC’s statement announcing Huw Edwards’ resignation stretched to a mere 55 words, 1.375 words for every year of his employment at the corporation. It’s the PR equivalent of a prayer — grounded in hope over experience — and is rounded like a full stop, designed to provide nothing for the tabloids to hook onto. The broadcaster also made it clear that the former newsreader got no payout for leaving, though he continued to receive his salary during the months that he was suspended.

The Sun, which first set the hares running with its July 8th 2023 front page story ‘Top BBC Star In Sex Pics Probe’, claims the resignation is “a vindication for the parents and for [its] public interest journalism”. It published a new interview with the estranged mother and step-father of the 20-year-old at the heart of the story yesterday, focused on their claim to “still be suffering”.

The paper continues to refer to the individual with whom Edwards is alleged to have exchanged messages and paid £35,000 for explicit images as “a young person” and a “youngster”. That use of words allows it to imply a level of wrongdoing already dismissed by the police and to leave its readers with the impression that there was a child involved in the story rather than someone’s child. That person called The Sun’s original reporting “rubbish” in a letter to the BBC from their solicitors and said that “nothing inappropriate or unlawful [had] taken place…”

The person’s stepfather told The Sun that he was “was disappointed they made a statement. It’s not true,” and their mother suggested that Edwards had “got into their head” and wondered how they could afford a solicitor.

Nine months passed between The Sun’s first story and Edwards’ resignation. In February this year, an independent report by Deloitte, commissioned by the BBC, concluded that the original complaint about Edwards was not escalated quickly enough. The corporation said it would take steps to improve its non-editorial complaints process. It clearly hopes that an impenetrable wall of PR pablum will put an end to any discussion of the case.

BBC News’ coverage of the resignation is similarly (and unsurprisingly) bland. On its website, the story stretched to a repetition of the BBC statement and a recitation of the events that led up to it. There’s a clear sense of relief that the organisation can now turn to the question of who will replace Edwards as the anchor for its general election coverage without the spectre of his suspension hanging over it.

There are two kinds of disingenuousness swirling around this story — from The Sun and from the BBC. The tabloid’s original ‘scoop’ was quickly revealed to be built on the claims of a single source (the estranged parents) and denied by the person who was framed as the victim. The paper’s headline was designed to provoke a guessing game and it knew from the start that Edwards would be smoked out by social media. His wife, Vicky Flind, had little choice but to name him in the end.

The BBC built Edwards up over decades and will now work diligently to scrub him from its collective history. It will be a difficult task given that he announced the death of Queen Elizabeth and anchored the coverage of King Charles’ coronation. The idea that Edwards’ downfall is somehow unique also plays into the disingenuous quality of the BBC response. The corporation has a star problem. It turns people who should be newsroom grafters into celebrities and the combination of over-inflated salaries and excess attention breaks them.

The Huw Edwards story isn’t over. It can’t come to any kind of satisfying conclusion until we hear his version. That may never happen, but if it does, I’m certain that it will be more complicated than the fable foisted upon us by The Sun. It may be that we are offered the same kind of self-serving explanation as the one Phillip Schofield gave after his own fall from grace or perhaps Edwards, who spent decades as a trusted face for viewers, might choose to give us some real honesty.

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