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Tim Davie was the BBC direction general (Picture: REUTERS) There’s something grimly comic about watching Tim Davie, arguably the most openly conservative Director-General the BBC has had in living memory, get taken down by the very people he’s spent five years trying to placate. Davie was the Tory pick who wanted more right-wing comedians, and who called for balance after years of bad-faith complaints about ‘BBC bias’. He is the man who seems to have believed that if he just gave Nigel Farage a warm enough seat and the right-wing press a sympathetic ear, they’d stop kicking the Beeb. They didn’t. They just kicked harder. Because here’s the truth the BBC refuses to face: You can’t appease people who don’t want you to exist. Farage and his ilk, shouting from the bully pulpit of parts of the right-wing press, don’t want a ‘fair BBC’. They want a dead one. They want a privatised, hollowed-out broadcaster run by hedge funds and headlines – and every time the BBC grovels to them, it just sharpens their knives. Trump has claimed credit for Davie’s resignation (Picture: 2025 Getty Images) Davie’s downfall began, absurdly, with an edit in a Trump documentary. In the eyes of plenty of journalists – it was a bog-standard splice of a speech that every broadcaster on Earth does a hundred times a day. You can’t show every second of every speech, or the Six O’clock News would be hours long. But the American right saw its chance. Trump’s White House accused the BBC of being ‘anti-Trump fake news’. And where Trump goes, the British right will surely follow. GB News lapped it up. The same British culture warriors who’ve been screaming ‘BBC bias’ since the dawn of time saw an opportunity to finish the job. Two resignations later – Davie and the CEO of News, Deborah Turness – and the corporation is once again apologising to people who wouldn’t watch it if you paid them. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Up Next Previous Page Next Page Davie was the ‘grown-up’ who was supposed to sort this out. He wasn’t. He thought you could reason with people who built their careers on bad faith. He thought he could stave off the culture war by feeding it scraps. But you can’t out-reason a bully. Look to the other side of the Atlantic if you need proof. We see American networks that have wasted little time bowing to Trump’s tantrums: CBS quietly settled a vexatious lawsuit with the President and Paramount sacked Stephen Colbert (one of the few comedians still prepared to mock the man). Trump’s America could lead to Farage’s Britain (Picture: Getty Images Europe) Trump’s people smell blood, and the newsrooms are terrified. Truth, it seems to me, has become a career hazard. That is what happens when you start treating wannabe dictators with the fawning they expect. And now we risk seeing Britain going in the same direction. The bosses at the BBC have become so spooked by accusations of bias that they’ve started policing tone instead of truth. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Up Next Previous Page Next Page The irony is delicious. Davie was picked precisely because he was their man – the rightwinger who’d restore trust. He was Boris-adjacent, safe for Downing Street, friendly with the press. Yet it’s those very same allies who hunted him down. Now the next Beeb Director-General needs to learn that no matter how far right you drift, it’s never far enough. Because it’s about power, not bias. No, it screams it because it works. It makes the BBC nervous and compliant to prove it isn’t ‘woke’ – usually leading to massive overcorrections. The right doesn’t scream ‘BBC bias’ because it actually wants fairness (Picture: PA) And once that fear takes root, they’ve won. We all know that the BBC’s not perfect. It can be slow, smug, and occasionally pompous. However, it is still the one British institution capable of saying something true without asking who it might upset. That’s why it’s being attacked. And this latest fiasco shows just how fragile that independence has become. It’s time it remembered that the public, not the pundits, pays its bills. Comment nowDo you think the BBC can regain trust with the public? Have your say belowComment Now Every time the BBC gives in to a billionaire-owned newspaper, even when their story has some legs, it loses another inch of trust with the public that actually believes in public broadcasting. So yes, the BBC did make an editing mistake in a Trump documentary – a lapse of judgement, a second of flawed footage in the hundreds of hours it produces a week. And I think that’s a good thing. That’s journalism: sometimes messy, sometimes wrong, but done in the pursuit of truth rather than to please politicians. Davies is a known friend of former PM Boris Johnson (Picture: James Manning/PA Wire) Davie thought he could hug crocodiles. Instead, he got eaten alive. The next Director-General doesn’t need to be ‘from the left’ or ‘from the right’. They just need to stop being scared. Stop apologising for journalism. Stop chasing the approval of people who think GB News is a credible source. Because if the BBC doesn’t rediscover its backbone fast, Trump’s America will become Farage’s Britain. Truth will become partisan, outrage will be currency, and the national broadcaster, forever a right-wing punching bag, will go from slightly staggered to knocked out cold. Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Ross.Mccafferty@metro.co.uk. Share your views in the comments below.
