Deluded Davie launches fightback

0:28The Telegraph With me, Tim Stanley. And me, Camilla Tomini.

0:42Tim, day nine in the BBC House of Horrors. We're on day nine of this story, would you believe? And now Trump's threatening to sue. Trump has gone to war with the BBC demanding a billion dollars. One billion dollars. One billion dollars. Why is it a billion, do we think? Just because it's a round number. It's a very, very big number. He is, of course, a famously detentious man who has a history of threatening or actually suing different people in a bid to correct the record or shut them down. In his words, to crack down on fake news. To crack down on fake news. I know this is so deliciously ironic, isn't it?

1:18Isn't it just? I wonder how BBC Verify are going to cover that. A 2016 study by USA Today identified more than 4 ,000 lawsuits filed by or against Donald Trump and his companies. And of course, that study is 10 years old. Yeah, so quite a lot has happened since then. But should we go back to the beginning? 1984, he sued the Chicago Tribune. He wanted to sue critic Paul Gap for$500 million over an article questioning his skyscraper plan. Trump said he had virtually torpedoed his plan to build a 150-storey skyscraper off the southern tip of Manhattan when he wrote the article. The case was dismissed.

1:59Of course. 2020 to 2023, Washington Post and the New York Times. He sued both over articles claiming his links to Russia. 2021, Mary Trump and New York Times sued... Mary Trump, friend to this podcast, do listen to that one. ...sued over stories on leaked tax record. Judge dismissed this, saying the claims fail as a matter of constitutional law. And indeed, Trump was ordered to pay the New York Times nearly$400 ,000. 2022, CNN, Trump's favourite station, not. He sought nearly$500 million from them, alleging bias, meant to harm his political prospects. Again, that case was dismissed. 2024, ABC was sued over the use of the phrase liable for rape in relation to the former president.

2:43Yes, George Stephanopoulos. He was sued. Actually, Trump won that one. And this one, they settled for$16 million in total. Including one million legal fees. I'm just thinking, did we not find the right vocation? I studied law. Why didn't I go and be one of Trump's lawyers? My mother wanted me to be a lawyer and I now think she might have been right. In 2024, he sued CBS for$10 billion. Dollars. That's ten times the BBC over an edit of a Kamala Harris interview. in which there were two clips that he said had been deceptively edited to paper over Kamala's word salad weakness and therefore interfere with the election.

3:23CBS's parent media group, Paramount, needed the Trump administration's approval for a planned merger, so settled for$16 million. In 2025, Wall Street Journal. He tried to sue them over alleged fake Epstein letters story. They published an article stating that in 2003, Mr Trump had written a sexually suggestive birthday letter to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Trump alleged that the letter was fake and said the article was published to harm his reputation. Dow Jones has said that the journal stands by its reporting and will vigorously fight the lawsuit. The case is still pending. This year, New York Times and Penguin Random House, he refiled a$15 billion suit over articles and a book about The Apprentice.

4:08The initial complaint alleged that three articles in a book which described Mr Trump's work as host of the television show were factually incorrect because they described him as having been discovered for the role when he had been famous long before the show began. A US district judge tossed the lawsuit on September 19th because the filing did not include a short and plain statement of the allegation, making it improper and impermissible. This whole thing of Trump threatening to sue people is a strategy, right? You say something about me, I will say it back. You sue me, I'll sue you. And you just grind people down with lawfare until they give up and walk away.

4:44And it's an old strategy that goes back to Donald Trump's youth. In 1973, when he was a young real estate man, the Justice Department took an interest in one of his properties and they accused him of racially discriminating against black people and hit him with a lawsuit. Now, Donald Trump did what we all do in those circumstances and hit a nightclub. Yes. Well, he bumped into Roy Cohn, famous legal counsel on the McCarthy witch hunt trials. Handy. Roy Cohn, great lawyer, terrifying lawyer, a real New York eccentric character, said to Trump, here's what you do whenever anyone accuses you of something.

5:21Accuse them of the same thing back. And Trump took that to heart. He followed his friend's advice and he accused the Justice Department of discriminating against him. Now, he didn't win that claim. Of course, he wasn't going to. It was madness. But it did seem to persuade the Justice Department to settle out of court, which meant that Trump never had to admit in court to the racial discrimination and thus he escaped some of the public ignominy. So it's an old strategy and it's one which seems to have worked for him in the past. But also there are now some, as we discussed yesterday, within the BBC using the Cone Rule.

5:58The Telegraph have accused them via a memo that was leaked to us report alleging that they lacked impartiality in a number of different areas. The strategy of Nick Robinson, David Yellen, Dalister Campbell and others has to use the Cone Rule and accuse us of mounting a conspiracy, a politically motivated conspiracy, because we are bad actors. Yes. Now, I mean, we are many things. You're not a bad actor because you're a great impersonator. Now, let's just analyse whether Trump can actually sue. This is the question. You're a lawyer by training. Well, I've got a law degree. I wouldn't go so far as to suggest I'm a lawyer, Tim.

6:36I'm a journalist. I did actually run this past the legal team so I could get my ducks in a row. Any good journalist is familiar with McNays, which is the law of journalism, and it also covers defamation. Now, he can't sue in the UK because if you're going to try and sue for defamation in this country, there needs to have been less than a year between the publication and your legal action. The Panorama documentary went out on Monday, October the 28th, 2024. Trump's only found out about it, courtesy of our colleague Gordon Rayner, in the last week. So he can't sue in the UK. He could apparently, according to our lawyers, try and extend that, but it probably wouldn't wash because there would be a very cogent argument for saying this thing was on the iPlayer for weeks and months.

7:23You could have found out about it earlier. Second of all, why is he suing in Florida? Well, he's able to do that because BBC America have an output there. There is a jurisdiction where people could have watched the Panorama documentary. Having said that, people are obviously balking at the$1 billion figure. He's obviously plucked that out of the sky. However, historically, juries in America have tended to pay huge payouts to those they feel have been defamed. The definition of defamation is that you have to lower someone's reputation in the eyes of right-minded people. So you could argue that it crosses that bar if you go down the route of saying that the way the footage was spliced was made to look as if Donald Trump was responsible for the Capitol riots.

8:09However, the legal bar in America to win a defamation claim is higher than the UK. In the UK, it's just that bar about lowering a reputation. And then those who have defamed have various different defences, justification, what we said was true, fair comment and all the rest of it. In America, when a public figure is defamed, you also have to prove malice, that this was done maliciously. And that's quite a high bar, because how are you then going to get into the minds of the BBC people who spliced the footage? They could say, well, as Jonathan Munro did, and we'll come on to him in a minute, he's stepped up into Deborah Ternis' boots as the acting CEO of BBC News after she resigned, along with the Director General Tim Davie yesterday.

8:56But this is the debate we're all having. Was it intended? Was it just a result of groupthink? Did somebody actively think, right, we need to really introduce Trump here? Yeah. It's all quite difficult. I'm also not clear that this has damaged Donald Trump's reputation. No, it's enhanced it again. As if previously we thought he was a living saint. As I've always said, my theory is that this was a shorthand for what they assumed, we all assume Donald Trump had done, and which a lot of people do think he did, which was essentially incite the Capitol Hill riot. We're just being expedient here. We're being expedient and cutting straight from the beginning to the end so we can sum up what everyone thinks he did.

9:36The point is it's really controversial. Having said that, there's a part of me that thinks good for you, Donald Trump, for suing, because why shouldn't you sue? If you do believe someone has said something inaccurate about you, someone very important in a way that really hurts you, then why shouldn't you, Sue? Yeah, I mean, everybody should have recourse to the law, and indeed in this country, to the Independent Press Standards Organization, if the media has in some way got it wrong. I mean, of course that must happen. And there's a touch of, dare I say, bias in how some in the media are handling this, because they have a low opinion of Donald Trump.

10:12Yes. But people have to be held account if they say something inaccurate, that that is wrong, and there should be redress for it. So Donald Trump has a right, as any citizen in the world has to, to be reported accurately upon. If he does successfully sue, the next question is who pays? The licence fee? Right. Us, you and I? What are they going to do to get a billion pounds out of it? Those who enjoy Line of Duty and other such shows? I think that might be the point at which I stop paying, by the way. Well, I think that might be the case for all of us. If I'm paying to line Donald Trump's pockets.

10:47By the way, on that note, a little later, a listener called Alan talked us through trying to cancel his licence fee yesterday. It's a great tale of a huge amount of telephonic frustration. Shall we listen to Tim Davie? It's quite extraordinary, this Tim. It almost sums up the entire nub of the problem here. This is him speaking going into the BBC. Yes. And by the way, everything is going jolly well. There's absolutely nothing to see here. He's very proud. Morning, everyone. Good morning. Just want to say a couple of things. I'm here to lead and support the BBC. I'm very, very proud of our journalists in this building.

11:24They're doing work, I think, that's incredibly important. I want to thank every one of them. They're doing a wonderful job. Also, everyone across the BBC doing their thing for the UK. And personally, I'm here to lead and support them. The BBC's going to be thriving, and I support everyone on the team. I'm very proud of them. Thank you very much, Your Honor. How will you be responding to it, Mr? So Tim Davy thinks everything's going brilliantly, and the journalism is just absolutely top-notch. We've now got this row. We mentioned Jonathan Munro earlier. He was Deborah Ternis' second in command.

11:54Now he's been appointed in her role. This is extraordinary for a number of different reasons. We discussed them briefly yesterday. Let's just go over it again. He was in part responsible for the decision to fly a chopper above Cliff Richard's house as it was being raided by police before he had been arrested or charged for anything, which is questionable from a journalistic point of view. He is said to have been a close friend and supporter of Hugh Edwards. He was the one who recommended that Martin Bashir be given a role back at the BBC despite grave concerns about his panorama interview with Princess Diana.

12:33He was given the religion brief. We're going to put that to one side because we're going to be discussing that panorama documentary with Andy Webb who's written a book about the whole thing called Dianorama. We'll get into that tomorrow. It's too much for today. And of course, crucially, he is cited in the leaked memo as the senior news executive at the BBC who watched the spliced panorama footage of Trump and saw no problem with it at all. He has continued to say there's no problem with this, which I would suggest creates a problem. But can I just say, there's a lot of chicanery going on right now with a lot of pro-BBC people in protective mode, John Simpson and others, making this purely about Trump.

13:16This story is not just about Trump. No. And it works to the BBC's advantage for it to be seen to be all about Trump. Because if it is, then it becomes the BBC standing up against the world's most powerful man. World's most evil man. Most evil man. And there are a lot of liberal left commentators out there and politicians like Davey who will jump on that bandwagon. To be fair, Davey will jump on anything moving just to get some camera footage. I know, dressed as Batman. But they wouldn't be getting this degree of support if the issue was simply accuracy in media. They're getting this amount of support because Trump is involved and also because the BBC, some people at the BBC are pushing the idea that Davey has been forced out by a right wing coup.

14:08That ties together like bits of string on a lunatic's wall map. Yes. Trump, Boris Johnson appointees, the Daily Telegraph. This all dates back to Boris Johnson. I know. The man who most of us regard as the least conservative, conservative prime minister of our lifetimes turns out to have been this extraordinary libertarian under the bed who all along had a plan for destroying the BBC from within. Also, let's be honest, accusations of bias date back decades. There was an inquiry into the BBC's coverage of all grief back in the 1980s. I mean, what on earth is going on? But also, very importantly, Tim, the memo didn't just mention the Trump footage.

14:48It mentioned the coverage of Gaza. It pointed to the Gaza documentary that had to be pulled and the fact that seemingly BBC Arabic and indeed the BBC were platforming people with connections to Hamas without pointing that out to the audience. It talked about the wokeification of the presentation of British history. and crucially it talked about how trans coverage was censored. Now, I spoke to an insider at the BBC this morning. You heard me on the blower to him. He points to an event that occurred in 2020 which may explain some of this. Fran Unsworth, that was the woman previously in the Deborah Turnis role, so the head of BBC News effectively, the most senior journalist there, introduced this new concept called News 2020.

15:39The name was changed, but irrelevant because COVID happened and stuff. But basically two things happened under that new project. First of all, there was the centralisation of the commissioning of all stories to a very small group of editorial executives. And second of all, it also involved cuts to middle management who have been described to me as the, quote, institutional memory of the BBC. one other producer said this, a very senior person at the BBC, quotes, they got rid of a lot of programme editors and almost all programme reporters and then wonder where the groupthink comes from. Now, just to explain that from a news perspective, if you've got a very small hub of like-minded people commissioning across the BBC, then you may have diversity in a DEI sense, but you don't have diversity of thought, opinion, or indeed reporting approach.

16:29There are a great many journalists there who are really upset about their attempts for balance and their efforts to produce really good programs being overshadowed by some of these sorry tales. They're saying that the one thing that has not changed since the Supreme Court judgment is the treatment of the trans debate. There are many people in the BBC, and some of them are younger because the experienced staff have gone, who don't even think there should be a debate about trans. Yes, yes. They don't want to entertain anything gender critical because they don't think gender critical views are valid.

17:02They think they're evil and wrong. Yeah. And Emily Maitlis has said on her podcast, which we shall not name, that when she worked at Newsnight. Don't listen to it. When they at Newsnight were working on the Tavistock clinic story, which to be fair, had a huge impact and eventually led to a change in government policy. She points out that they were the only people covering it and they were, quote unquote, terrified of covering it. So this is why this is not just about Trump. It's not just about inaccuracy in one story. It is about the structure of the organization that leads to inaccuracy and bias, that embeds bias.

17:44As you've described it, they centralized everything, sacked a whole load of middle managers, brought in some freelancers who were young and woke. and inevitably they ended up reinforcing certain opinions. And there is one concrete example of this, which is they created a centralizing LGBTQ desk. So if you had a different program wanted to cover a gay-related issue or a trans issue, they had to go through a desk and possibly use the desk's own correspondence to report on it. Now, it's obvious how that's a problem with the trans issue because a lot of people who work for such desks are inherently pro-trans That's how they got the job If you are a gender and identity correspondent, I suspect you're sympathetic to trans rights To be fair, Ms Moen is named in the memo as somebody who, at the BBC tried to block an attempt to get a different view on transgender issues from Women's Place UK which is a gender critical organisation that was instrumental in the Supreme Court ruling.

18:49Actually, I think that organisation's wound up because they think their work has been done here. She said it was an extremist group. And so that was the example cited in Gordon's coverage of that particular aspect of this memo, which was the censoring of trans coverage. And also the memo refers to a case in which a trans wrestler was presented in a very positive light, despite the controversy around putting women up against a man who's transitioned or whatever. Now, imagine, if you will, that there is a disability desk. The people sitting on that disability desk are likely, because almost every single disability rights organisation feels this way, are likely to be opposed to assisted dying.

19:30Yes. So imagine if whenever the BBC wanted to run a story about assisted dying, it had to go through a disability desk staffed by people who are against assisted dying, And they said no to any stories about someone dying in pain or yes to any stories which feature a Catholic bishop saying how evil euthanasia is. There would be an outcry about this. Yes, it wouldn't be balanced. Because it's political bias. These are substantive, clear examples of not just biased action, but how the bias is embedded in the organisation through its structure. that's that's what this is really all about that's why tim davy had to go because he is overseeing this structure he has to take responsibility for it you don't this is not just about one error or one row with donald trump

20:31Just another point that this very senior former BBC bod made to me. He said he had had one conversation with Tim Davie in his entire time there, face to face, in which he had pointed out that that Project 2020, this centralised commissioning and this getting rid of middle people who had a degree of institutional memory was a terrible mistake and would compromise impartiality. The source claims that Davey responded to that with a degree of dismissal and disdain. Second of all, this person said, if you really want to prove that our news is impartial, you must do your very best to hold on to Andrew Neil, who at the time was, of course, flirting with establishing a new news channel known now as GB News.

21:16And yes, there was a fallout and he never ended up doing it. But there was this quest to keep him at the BBC as it had at the time decommissioned this week in which he famously interviewed lots of different people. Had that panel featuring Michael Portillo and Diane Abbott, which was always really good value. So, again, Davey said no. I mean, this is the other confusion. He said no to fighting to keep Andrew Hill. Yeah, he just didn't think that was important. Even though the BBC fought to keep Gary Lineker. Well, quite. And there's a case for saying that anyone could do what Gary Lineker did, but no one could do what Andrew Neil did.

21:50No, that's right. And I think also Andrew Neil was constantly a thorn in everyone's sides in editorial meetings saying, but hang on, can we please rigorously interrogate why it is that so many people are supporting Brexit or why it is that Nigel Farage's reform party appears to be on the up or whatever it might be, to looks of sort of absolute horror by some of his colleagues. The other thing I think worth mentioning here is again Robbie Gibb's name. So we've got people on the right sort of pointing out Jonathan Munro's deficiencies and people on the left once again questioning why on earth it could be that Sir Robbie Gibb, who was Director of Communications at Number 10 under Theresa May, could possibly be on the BBC board as if he is solely responsible.

22:34He's apparently close to Michael Prescott, who wrote the memo. So, again, it completely dismisses the fact that David Grossman was the one who raised the concerns. He's a BBC staffer. Again, this is being somewhat misreported. People get the impression that Prescott is the man who dug all this stuff up. No, it was an internal thing. It was an internal thing. And Grossman is a very highly respected journalist at the BBC. Can we please get our heads around that? But also, what on earth are people talking about? This BBC board is made up of 12 members, including the director general and the chairman.

23:08So are we really suggesting that Robbie Gibb has single-handedly executed a right-wing plot with the say-so? He has somehow corralled all of the other very senior people on this board. These are respectable people from the world of business, culture, government, wherever, that he's done this all by himself with our help. Because, oh, by the way, he wants to replace Tim Davie. What hope in hell is there of somebody like Robbie Gibb taking that role? I mean, two people's names have been put in the frame. Trevor Phillips is one of them. We're then looking back to people like Jay Hunt and others that previously worked for the BBC.

23:43Fine. But there's no way a righty, in inverted commas like you. Well, definitely not now. Of course not. So, again, it speaks to the problem at the heart of this, which is, again, this perception that anyone left is good and anyone right is bad, as far as the BBC is concerned. So maybe Trump can sue. Maybe he can't. Maybe he'll get a billion dollars out of them. Maybe not. But the most pressing immediate problem facing the BBC is its political reputation, because the Labour government likes the BBC but can't tolerate this and is obviously going to demand changes. We know one thing, Tim, if there is going to be a review into the future of the BBC licence fee, it will be carried out by Dame Louise Casey.

24:26who isn't busy enough looking into the future of adult social care, overseeing the grooming gang inquiry and many other posts. Because it is probably a can that the Labour government wants to kick down the road until the point where the charter is set for renewal in 2027, right? I mean, it's not really in Sir Keir Starmer's interest to start upsetting the BBC apple cart right now. And the BBC, by the way, lobbies politicians to support it. It gives them free tickets. It invites them to things. It's absolutely outrageous. Imagine there's a public institution which publicises itself. Yes. But it does.

25:03So it has strings it can pull. Tim, I said before we'd go that I was just going to talk you through very quickly Alan Newland, who is a regular listener to The Daily Tea, and wrote in to describe the trouble he went to to try and cancel his licence fee yesterday. And it sounds like some kind of telephonic hell where you're kept on hold for ages with green sleeves playing in the background. So basically he said that he phoned in a bid to cancel the licence fee. It took him 40 minutes to even get to the point where somebody could deal with his particular inquiry. The cancellation process then took a further 20 minutes because the guy who took the call from the original person who took the call then asked him to do that thing of repeating everything and stating his name again and giving his postcode and all the rest of it.

25:50He was then interrogated as to whether he did indeed intend to watch BBC, BBC iPlayer, any other channel, live TV on any platform conceivable, just to check that he was genuine in his desire to never engage with BBC content again. He turned around and said the only use he had for his TV was to be able to watch DVDs. The person on the end of the phone, presumably millennial, maybe Gen Z, openly laughed in his face. Oh, wonderful. Because he probably hadn't heard of a DVD. Just imagine if he'd said Blu-ray. Probably thought it was an LP. Yeah, something like that. So he said he watched video reels on Instagram and Facebook and then he had the gall to tell me that some of those reels are shortened versions of BBC links and therefore he would need a licence.

26:33Oh, rubbish. You don't need a licence to watch YouTube for the love of God. Anyway, finally I was asked to choose from the following options. Option one, to continue playing the licence fee so that I could access BBC services. Option two, to cancel my direct debit when the licence expires in October 2026. I replied, neither. I want to cancel the licence now. I want to cancel my direct debit and apply for a refund for the remaining 11 months of the licence. Oh, that's option three. You didn't tell me there was an option three. He said to the person on the end of the call, well, I was going to. After 65 minutes on a charged call.

27:12Outrageous. I succeeded. did. That's the whole experience summed up, isn't it? 65 minutes trapped on a charged call. It reminds me of a view to a kill. Morbiddy leaves the KGB. We're not allowed to leave the BBC. Also, the next thing he knows they're going to send David Yelland and Nick Robinson round to his house to knock on the door. One of those detector van trucks. Yeah, just to check he isn't watching. Yes, with a big radar on the roof. Bargain hunt. We're going to be back tomorrow with that expose of Martin Bashir's Panorama interview with Princess Diana, 5pm.