The 'Talent'

Huw Edwards' conviction leaves the BBC with another set of serious questions to answer and allows The Sun to cry vindication.

Previously: The Note

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I was deeply critical of The Sun’s story about Huw Edwards last year. I was wrong. While that case was not the one that ended up with the BBC’s former top news presenter pleading guilty to possessing vile images of child sexual abuse, the actions described — paying a much younger person for intimate photos — were a clue to a pattern of behaviour. That Edwards was not found to have committed a crime then did not mean that there was no abuse of power and position.

While there are many justified reasons for despising The Sun and believing it has a malign role in British culture, they don’t mean the original revelations were not in the public interest. As the de facto face of the BBC during major events and for so many years on the news bulletins, Edwards had an authority that he could exploit in the quiet corners of DMs and WhatsApp exchanges. His is a peculiarly grim kind of betrayal of trust.

Sticking to the question of trust, the BBC has failed in its duty to the public again. In its statement after Edwards’ guilty plea, it said:

In November 2023, whilst Mr Edwards was suspended, the BBC as his employer at the time was made aware in confidence that he had been arrested on suspicion of serious offences and released on bail whilst the police continued their investigation. At the time, no charges had been brought against Mr Edwards and the BBC had also been made aware of significant risk to his health. 

Edwards didn’t resign from the BBC until April. For five months after it was aware that he had been arrested, the corporation continued to pay him and gave him a pay rise. While it was legally hemmed in before Edwards was charged with an offence — it claims it would have sacked him immediately if he’d still been employed by it when that happened — the BBC could have avoided awarding him a pay increase. He was the organisation’s highest-paid journalist last year, even as it continued to make drastic cuts to its news operations. It could fund multiple reporters for the price of a single Huw Edwards.

BBC News journalists have reported on the Edwards story with stoic professionalism and in the corporation’s familiar self-flagellating tone. It’s the management, which knew what was coming, that has let them and the licence payers down. When the BBC released its terse 55-word statement in April, I wrote that it was the “PR equivalent of a prayer — grounded in hope over experience — and rounded like a full stop, designed to provide nothing for the tabloids to hook onto.” But it knew then that the story had just come to an ellipsis.

Katie Razzall, the BBC’s Culture and Media Editor summed up the corporation’s problem succinctly, saying there are “serious questions for the BBC and its Director General” and continuing: “Now that we know these facts, the decision [to keep paying Edwards] does look very reputationally difficult for the BBC.” Edwards becomes the latest in a string of sex offenders that can be hung around the BBC’s neck — from Jimmy Savile to Rolf Harris and Stuart Hall.

But where Savile’s shows can be left to moulder in the vaults and his appearances on Top of the Pops can be excised from the popular repeats series, Edwards is intricately woven through some of the key moments in recent history. He announced Queen Elizabeth II’s death, anchored the coverage of King Charles III’s coronation and helmed multiple election nights. He will be much harder to scrub from the BBC’s collective memory. A BBC executive groaned to The Times: “News is a matter of public record. What a nightmare.”

At Westminster Magistrates Court’, Judge Paul Goldspring asked for a probation report to consider the risk of Edwards re-offending, the possibility of a prison sentence, and the motivation behind his offences. That last question will be the one that many people focus on: What would compel a man in such a prominent position, with such a level of fame and wealth, to be complicit in such abhorrent acts?

There’s no logical answer to that but the BBC’s culture of creating stars is part of the issue. There’s a divide between the grafters and footsoldiers at the corporation and a golden class of presenters that become the ‘talent’. They become celebrities and the combination of over-inflated salaries and excess attention can break them.

Edwards is the only person responsible for his actions but there seems to be plenty of evidence that the BBC allowed him to be ‘difficult’ That culture of protecting “the talent” creates an environment where it’s hard for others to raise concerns about their behaviour. It took an investigation by Victoria Derbyshire for Newsnight to reveal last year that three current and former BBC staffers had accused Edwards of sending them inappropriate messages.

Former BBC News US Editor and now News Agents host Jon Sopel wrote at the time: “A BBC news presenter using BBC resources to investigate another BBC News presenter. Does it get any weirder or madder?” But that’s precisely what the BBC should do without fear or favour. If more people had taken Derbyshire’s approach to whispers within the corporation perhaps it would not have so many awkward and ugly questions to answer again.

When Edwards resigned, I wrote that the man who’d “spent decades as a trusted face for viewers might choose to give us some real honesty”, but it took the police and the courts to reveal the truth about him. The Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, has said she’ll meet BBC Director General, Tim Davie, to ask him about the handling of the affair but in the end, it’s the public who deserves those answers. The BBC put so much of its trust in Edwards that restoring trust in it will be one of its most difficult challenges yet. Its commercial rivals and the right-wing press which jump on any misstep once again have a real scandal to sink their teeth into.

The professional obituaries of Huw Edwards make much of the downfall of his glittering career but spend far fewer words on the children in those images that he willingly received. That’s the real tragedy here, not the crisis at the BBC or the end of the line for one particular member of the ‘talent’.

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