Trump slams ‘dishonest’ BBC after Tim Davie and news head Deborah Turness quit: Live

Former prime minister Gordon Brown said Tim Davie and Deborah Turness should have apologised instantly.

Speaking on Sky News he said: “You’ve got to be trusted, and I think the problem that the BBC has had is this happened a year ago, and an apology should be made instantly if a mistake has been made, you’ve got to apologise instantly.”

“Then I don’t think Tim Davie or the head of news would have had to resign because they would have corrected the mistake immediately.”

He added that instead it went “unreported” and “unacknowledged”.

The BBC’s board has not properly defended the corporation, a former Downing Street communications chief has suggested.

Sir Craig Oliver, who is also a former BBC news executive, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the problems at the corporation “matter”, adding “the BBC is an enormous institution with a huge impact on British life”.

“What I think has gone wrong here, I think is really an issue of the governance of the institution,” Sir Craig said.

“We’re living in a fast-moving digital world where there are a lot of people who want to attack the BBC, and what we’ve seen is really a vacuum that has been created.

“It’s been obvious for days now that the BBC needed to step up, explain, apologise, move on.

“And what we’ve seen is the governance of the BBC saying, ‘we’ll get back to you on Monday – we’ll leave that for days. We’ll allow the President of the United States to be attacking the institution, and we’re not going to properly defend it’.”

The Independent’s Whitehall editor Kate Devlin reports…

A minister has said it is “fundamentally important” that the BBC represents the “full spectrum” of views.

Speaking to Sky News, defence minister Louise Sandher-Jones said: “One thing I’ve found really interesting as a constituency MP is I meet such a broad range of people who have such a broad range of views.”

She later added: “It’s absolutely fundamentally important that the BBC as our national broadcaster represents the full spectrum of those views.

“I think that is quite a challenging thing to do, but nonetheless it’s an incredibly important duty, which I know it seeks to uphold across all of its wide wide range of programming.”

Asked whether she does think the corporation does reflect those views, Ms Sandher-Jones said: “I think on the whole it does.”

Leader of the Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, has said we must “stand up for a free press” and “free speech”, responding to news that the BBC director general Tim Davie and CEO of News Deborah Turness have resigned.

“The BBC isn’t perfect, but it remains one of the few institutions standing between our British values and a populist, Trump-style takeover of our politics,” he said.

“The resignations of Tim Davie and Deborah Turness must be an opportunity for the BBC to turn a new leaf, rebuild trust and not give in to the likes of Nigel Farage who want to destroy it.

“As a public service broadcaster, the BBC’s role is vital in ensuring our democracy is based on facts, scrutiny, and accountability.

“We must stand up for a free press, free speech, and a strong, independent BBC, to stop Trump’s America becoming Farage’s Britain.”

The BBC should “take impartiality seriously”, a former editor of The Daily Telegraph has said.

Lord Charles Moore told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that now Tim Davie and Deborah Turness had resigned “this [the BBC] will be better, or if it isn’t better that really is the end of the BBC because now you [the BBC] have the chance to take impartiality seriously”.

He added: “First thing you have to do is admit you’re wrong instead of trying to defend yourself in this ridiculous way.

“All the BBC bias goes in one direction… the memo goes, it could go much, much further, but it’s about trans issues, identity, race, Trump, Israel, Gaza… it’s always from a sort of metropolitan, left position absolutely consistently. That’s how the bias is.

“So that means that it’s not serving a very large percentage of the licence fee-payers.

“I’m not, of course, saying that it should be right-wing either. I’m saying it should take impartiality seriously and put in people capable of running this gigantic and self-satisfied bureaucracy.”

Government minister Louise Sandher-Jones rejected suggestions the BBC was institutionally biased.

The veterans minister told Sky News: “When you look at the huge range of domestic issues, local issues, international issues, that it has to cover, I think its output is very trusted.

“When I speak to people who’ve got very strongly held views on those, they’re still using the BBC for a lot of their information, it’s forming their views on this.

“I think we can all point to elements of BBC broadcasting of news and say ‘well, that reflects my views, and that doesn’t’ and that’s absolutely right, that we should be able to say that.”

Asked about Donald Trump’s comments on the BBC, she said: “President Trump will obviously speak for himself.

“Tim Davie and Deborah Turness have been quite clear that it’s their decision that they’ve stepped down and I note that the board has thanked them for their service and had said that it had supported them.

“But they’ve, as they’ve said, taken accountability for what the BBC has put out. I think it is very important that public figures have accountability.”

The resignations of the BBC’s director-general and its head of news was “a coup”, a former newspaper editor has said.

David Yelland, who edited The Sun from 1998 to 2003, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the departure of director-general Tim Davie and Deborah Turness, the chief executive of BBC News, was “an inside job”.

He said: “It was a coup, and worse than that, it was an inside job.

“There were people inside the BBC, very close to the board, very close to the, on the board, who have systematically undermined Tim Davie and his senior team over a period of (time) and this has been going on for a long time. What happened yesterday didn’t just happen in isolation.”

He also described Mr Davie’s resignation as “a failure of governance”.

“What has happened here is there was a failure of governance,” he said.

“I don’t blame the chairman (Samir Shah) as an individual, but the job of the chair of any organisation, a company – including the BBC – is to keep their CEO, their top man or woman, in post or fire them.

“And that has not happened, because Tim Davie was not fired. He walked and so there was, that is the definition of a failure of governance.”

The Independent’s Whitehall editor Kate Devlin reports…

Former culture secretary Nicky Morgan has welcomed the resignations of Tim Davie and Deborah Turness.

She told the Independent the pair had been “right” to resign.

She added: “The question is what the BBC Board does now to get a grip of the underlying situation.”

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has welcomed the resignations of Tim Davie and Deborah Turness.

But she adds that the resignations are alone are not enough to address what she describes as “institutional bias” at the BBC.

“It’s right that Tim Davie and Deborah Turness have finally taken responsibility and resigned from the BBC,” Ms Badenoch said.

“But let’s be honest, this has been a catalogue of serious failures that runs far deeper. The Prescott report exposed institutional bias that cannot be swept away with two resignations – strong action must be taken on all the issues it raised.

“The culture at the BBC has not yet changed. BBC Arabic must be brought under urgent control. The BBC’s US and Middle East coverage needs a full overhaul. And on basic matters of biology, the corporation can no longer allow its output to be shaped by a cabal of ideological activists.

“The new leadership must now deliver genuine reform of the culture of the BBC, top to bottom – because it should not expect the public to keep funding it through a compulsory licence fee unless it can finally demonstrate true impartiality.”