Headless BBC now faces its biggest threat, writes Andrew Marr

Tim Davie was bad at politics, rubbing MPs up the wrong way, rarely apologising and assuming, too often, that all criticism was ideological and personally hostile.

The trouble was, as compared to predecessors such as John Birt, Greg Dyke, Tony Hall or Mark Thompson, he was never nearly interested enough in the fast-moving, high adrenaline and high risk business of news.

He joined as a marketing man, from Pepsi. A Tory, as it happens, he never seemed exactly fascinated by the granular struggles of news and current affairs journalism. He was above that. Experienced journalists left.

This need not have been too serious had the corporation tried to bring in the best outsiders. But some of the shrewdest hacks in the trade, hoping to join the BBC, weren’t even given the courtesy of an interview.

An American newspaper editor once drolly joked that his job was to separate the wheat from the chaff… and then print the chaff. Like many, I fear there has been too much chaff – virtue signalling non-stories, meaningless “vox pops” and the elevation of celebrity guff above the wheat of real, essential information – which requires open minded fascination about our changing world. The launch of “BBC Verify” led some to wonder what the rest of the huge BBC reporting operation was meant to be doing.

On Tim Davie’s watch, BBC News was run by two former independent television people, Deborah Turness, the former CEO and editor of ITN, and Jonathan Monro, the former political news, editor and ITN.

Now, ITN is a great organisation which has produced excellent journalism; but its go-get-‘em culture is very different from the BBC’s. A greater aggression, a lesser readiness to meet critics seriously, has been part of the problem at the bigger organisation.

Yet from whatever perspective you choose, the Panorama editing of the Donald Trump “insurrection” speech was outrageous. It should have been apologised for, immediately, and fulsomely. Had somebody directly involved been sacked, the director general would not have had to go last night.

Having spent more years of my life than I care to remember in stuffy BBC edit suites, I well understand the pressure to get maximum “punch” and impact from raw footage. But when you cut out material, you better make damn sure it doesn’t change the message, and you should always let the viewer know that editing has happened, with an appropriate “buzz”, or cutaway, or verbal reference.

We have had similar rows before, from the misleading editing of an interview with Jeremy Corbyn in 2015, to the Queen appearing to storm out of a photo shoot in a 2007 documentary – a piece of editorial dishonesty which led to the resignation of the then Controller of BBC one, Peter Fincham. Newspapers, of course, regularly take different parts from speeches or public comments and ram them together to mislead. But the BBC should always be above that and always regard this kind of accusation as incredibly serious.

In one way, this is just another BBC row. Diana and Martin Bashir; Jimmy Savile; “Maggie’s Militant Tendency”; they come, they go. But the truth is, with a Reform government quite possible and so much of the traditional and online media not only moving to the right, but moving particularly against the BBC, this is not just another row. The organisation is in mortal peril.

Right now, it is also lacking its editorial and journalistic command, or to change the image, it is effectively headless, sprinting in circles round the farmyard squirting blood. And the hatchet is lying there in full view: just because most BBC executives are paranoid, doesn’t mean that their enemies aren’t out there, determined to destroy them.

What next? The BBC has to find new leadership, and fast. But any new director general will walk into a wall of hostility and relentless attack. It has become the most unforgiving job in the country and very few rational, balanced people would want it.

It may be already the case that such obvious candidates as James Harding, former editor of The Times, former boss of BBC News and co-founder of Tortoise Media; or Jay Hunt, the former controller of BBC One, now with Apple, have already looked in the mirror and said to themselves - no chance, mate. Harding has just bought the Observer and rules himself out. Ian Katz, formally of the Guardian, and then BBC Newsnight, now chief content officer at Channel 4, would be on any shortlist.

But whether it’s them or one of a number of prominent journalists still keen to give it a go, these are not jobs which can be safely left vacant for long.

The BBC helped make modern Britain. Its collapse would change us irrevocably and dramatically. Today, it is teetering. It still employs fine journalists and has deep technical know-how. It can still make popular hits. But its domestic enemies, and the big American streamers, are circling.

We are in a downward spiral and we cannot assume that once-fundamental institutions, such as the monarchy, the NHS or the BBC will survive much longer.

Inside, morale is rock bottom and for the core news and current affairs purposes there’s nobody, really, in charge. The chair of the board, Samir Shah, I’m told, did not want Davie to go. He lost that argument. Now he must not - cannot - rest. The very future of the BBC may rest on his next choice.

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Andrew Marr is an author, journalist and presenter for LBC.

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