By Ellie Muir

Copyright independent

Greg James has defended the BBC’s impartiality rules, admitting it’s an imperfect operation because it’s a “bunch of humans running a huge corporation”.

The BBC Radio 1 Breakfast Show presenter, 39, who is one of the corporation’s highest-earning hosts with an estimated salary of £425,000, stated in a new interview that he has immense respect for the BBC and its mission to remain impartial.

“You can’t have 5,000 presenters spouting personal opinions all day,” he said.

James writes in his new book All the Best for the Future: Growing Up without Growing Old that there has been a “surge in far-right lunatic parties”, but told The Times he could not say that on his radio show.

“There is a lot of unkind, racist stuff flying around and people feel scared,” he said. “I’m not going to take that into my radio show, but I can write it and, if it becomes a fuss, it’ll be great for sales.”

James admitted that the BBC’s impartiality policy can become more complicated when its regular presenters have different platforms, as seen in Rylan Clark’s controversial discussion of immigration on ITV’s This Morning in August, which received 576 Ofcom complaints.

The host said he would never get into a debate on something he wasn’t clued up on, adding: “Unfortunately [when Rylan was on], This Morning’s editorial was, ‘We are going to talk about this.’ But, if you do, you need to be so robust.”

James added he is robust in what he specialises in: being “aggressively fun, aggressively silly and aggressively welcoming of people on Breakfast, but I would not engage in any sort of discussion that I’m not qualified to do”.

The interviewer also pointed towards Gary Lineker, who left the BBC following a row regarding a post he shared on social media about Zionism that included an image of a rat – historically an antisemitic insult.

James said: “Yes, it’s imperfect and will always be, but that’s because the BBC is a bunch of humans running a huge corporation.”

In his new book, James reveals that his starting salary at the BBC when he was 21 was £80,000. At the time, he had been offered a local station job for £18,000.

Asked why he chose to publish that information, in a climate where BBC salaries are scrutinised since the corporation is funded by the licence fee, James said it was about taking ownership.

“As in, if you are going to print my salary, I’m going to tell you my first salary. If that’s the game, then fine.”

Elsewhere in the interview, James admitted he gets “paid handsomely” to entertain people on the radio each morning, but he would “do it for nothing”.

James has worked at Radio 1 since 2007, when he initially presented the early breakfast slot on Fridays and covered for other presenters. He later moved to the drivetime show, which he hosted from 2012 to 2018, before replacing Nick Grimshaw as the Breakfast Show host.