Does the government want to sack the BBC boss?

0:00Bite into a stack sandwich made with Hero Bread, and the only thing you'll think is delicious. You won't think it has up to 19 grams of protein, 11 to 32 grams of fiber, or just 0 to 5 grams net carbs. But it does. Hero Bread. No compromises. Just loaves, buns, tortillas, bagels, and noodles packed with flavor. Right now, get 10 % off at Hero.co with code iHeart. That's H-E-R-O dot C-O, code iHeart. All figures per serving of Hero Bread. See nutrition facts on Hero.co. This is a Global Player original podcast. Let me turn now to the role of the BBC. On Saturday afternoon, just after the broadcast, I called the Director-General to ask for an explanation and what immediate steps the BBC leadership intended to take.

0:50As the Prime Minister said yesterday, it is essential that the BBC explains how these scenes came to be broadcast. The BBC has rightly apologised and took the immediate decision not to put this content on iPlayer. I welcome that. However, key outstanding questions remain, including... That was the Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, speaking a week ago. This weekend, she was asked a question that was far simpler. Does she have confidence in the Director General of the BBC, Tim Davey? She wouldn't say. But is it government overreach for the Culture Secretary to call for the DG to go? And has this government, the Labour government, fallen out of love with the BBC?

1:40Welcome to the News Agents.

1:46It's John. It's Emily. And the mood music has been there, I think, for the last few months. There is not, in other words, a lot of love between Lisa Nandy personally and Tim Davey, the director general. But this weekend, the culture secretary gave an interview to The Times and she repeated her demand for an explanation as to what happened at Glastonbury. What happened around that Gaza documentary that is still under investigation, that has still not produced any answers, even though it goes back to February. And what Lisa Nandy says in this interview is, I want an explanation as to why not. If it is a sackable offence, then obviously that should happen.

2:34She's asked if she has confidence in Tim Davey. She doesn't say a thing. And in that silence, I guess volumes will be read. Of course, because what normally happens is that lines of communication are open and regularly used between the head of the BBC, whether it be Tim Davey, the director general or Samir Shah, the chairman. There is an endless conversation going on between government and the BBC. The fact that Lisa Nandy has chosen to go public on her frustrations is significant in itself. She clearly is beyond frustrated with Tim Davie. The impression being given is that she doesn't think he's up to the job.

3:15That led to on Thursday of last week, Samir Shah as chairman of the BBC saying we've got full confidence in Tim Davie. She then gives an interview at the weekend saying, really, have you? Are you sure that's right? And you wonder what is the arm wrestle that is going on in private about this? Is it simply that someone's head should roll? And why haven't we got a report yet on this documentary about Gaza and the young kid whose father had connections with Hamas that wasn't declared? Why haven't we got to the bottom of that yet? Or is it something wider that's to do with charter renewal? Yeah, she says the BBC leadership have got to get a grip on it.

3:56It makes me angry on behalf, she says, of BBC staff and the whole creative industries in this country. We've both been speaking to people sort of past and present of the BBC. I was speaking to one former exec who essentially put it down to something very tribal. He said, look, Nandi doesn't like Tories. She's categorised Tim Davey as a Tory in quotes. This works as part of her desire to flush him out. Maybe even if it's subconscious, she sees things through a lens of criticism rather than sort of constructive empathy. This person said that, you know, her dislike for him is slightly divorced from the reasons behind it.

4:37Now, that sounds to me a little bit like saying, oh, she gets over emotional. You know, she can't let her politics allow her to see clearly. And I feel it's slightly too simplistic. But it is interesting that the fight that Labour is picking with Tim Davy or that Nandi is picking with Tim Davy is not coming from a traditional left position. It's coming from a more centre-right position. In other words, she thinks that their actions over the Gaza documentary and their actions over Bob Villan, the band that appeared at Glastonbury shouting those chants about death to the IDF, were wrong, were bad, bad mistakes.

5:19and that she is acting weirdly as if she thinks that Tim Davey has let the BBC go down a slightly insurgent path without due care to many of the people working there. One of the serving senior executives at the BBC said to me he thought the problem with Lisa Nandy was that she was just far too pro-Israel in her outlook and demeanour and that that is partly a result of the constituency that she represents, which has a large Jewish community in South Manchester. that she is too pro-israel is not impartial only sees the mistakes and look there have been mistakes and the bbc is a infuriating organization putting its hand up and say yeah we screwed up there and i think that she has just run out of patience i also think there is stuff and this was said to me last week i went to an event where there were an awful lot of bbc people there one of the things that was said to me is that tim davy is safe all the time that the board thinks that he is the best person to deliver the renewal of the charter i the bbc's operating license if you like for another 10 years and the moment they think that tim is an impediment to that that's the moment that samir shah will move against him samir shah is not doing that samir shah is saying he's the right person but i bet you there are negotiations and there's some interesting reporting around saying that actually what lisa nandy is trying to get is concessions over accountability in the bbc and the government saying we will be able to intervene much more directly in what you do and if you let us you can have your charter renewal maybe for a slightly longer period and that's an interesting one to watch as well because that is editorial control in a sense isn't it it's editorial over this is a big question right samir shar who's the chairman of the bbc i think has taken a very different approach to tim davy than to his predecessors not least because he's a journalist and he's a documentary maker and he comes from within.

7:25He hasn't been sort of planted on the top. He's come in through the BBC. He understands literally the nuts and bolts of how you make programmes. And I think for that reason, he's been slightly less scared. You know, he doesn't mind a bit of creative tension. Maybe there should be creative tension. The exec I was talking to said, that's not a bad thing. You know, in any governance structure, you don't want there to be a cosy relationship between your chairman and your DG or your chief exec. You want them to sort of cut up against each other sometimes because that's what keeps everyone on their toes.

7:57The question is whether you think that when the Labour government or any government is asking questions of the BBC, they are holding this huge Leviathan, behemoth, whatever you want, organisation to account, or whether you think they are starting to tell it what to do. And therein lies the fundamental discrepancy or queasiness. If we had been doing this podcast when Boris Johnson was prime minister and his culture secretary had more or less come out and said, I think the future of the DG is in doubt. Maybe it is time for him to go. I think we'd have said government overreach. What is the government doing telling the BBC what to do?

8:37Sorry, some of us did say that. The Boris Johnson government did put one of their own inside the BBC, on the BBC board. This person is also, I think I'm right in saying the co-owner or co-investor in the Jewish Chronicle, which has led to a lot of unease amongst many BBC staff in terms of what his editorial overreach is to do with the telling of the Gaza-Israel story. That's absolutely true. And the person you're talking about is a guy called Sir Robbie Gibb, who we both worked with in our BBC careers and who then went to become director of communications for Theresa May, leaving the BBC and then goes back into the BBC kind of to be overlord of impartiality or watching what the BBC was doing on impartiality.

9:18I suppose the difference is that what Johnson did was he tried to neuter the BBC by just intimidation, withholding government ministers from going on programmes if he didn't like the programmes concerned. What we didn't have was if you don't do this, then that. And with Lisa Nandy, it's sort of almost feeling like if you don't do this, then I'm going to ask for Tim Davy to resign. Or you could say that's just about governance. Keir Starmer isn't saying, oh, I'm not going to come on the BBC and do an interview or I'm not going to invite you on my press trips. I think what they have done is keep the editorial and the corporate government lines very separate.

9:56And for that, I think we should probably be grateful now. Yeah, absolutely. But at the same time, Lisa Nandy gave an interview where she knew she'd have been asked these questions. And even in not answering the question, she knew what she was doing. We're going to speak now to Craig Oliver, Sir Craig Oliver, who I think has been both our bosses at various times. He's a former editor at BBC News and former Downing Street director of politics and communications for David Cameron.

10:31good to see you craig do you think there is anything slightly unusual in the way that lisa nandy has gone about her criticism of the bbc and wanting clearly heads to roll that is say different from when you were in downing street a little i think there's a lot to unpack here she's clearly frustrated an incident that happened in february hasn't been released until july and this is this Gaza programme, who was responsible, who did what, when. And I think she's a real degree of frustration that you can tell that. And this is when one of the kids who's narrating the documentary is undisclosed as the son of a Hamas minister.

11:09Yes. How did that happen? And why does it take several months to tell us what went on and what's been happening there? So I can see that she is frustrated by that. I think there's a couple of other things going on here. is that there does seem to be a rolling state where the BBC seems to go from crisis to crisis. And each time there's a question about grip. Who's in charge? Who's responsible? And anybody who's worked at the BBC, as all of us know, is it's not quite like another organisation. It's not like there's a CEO and a direct line of control and everybody jumps when that person says jump.

11:40The BBC is much looser than that. And I think that the BBC, when I try and explain it to people, it's much more like that the director general is more like a medieval king and he's got a series of very powerful barons beneath him that he needs to influence rather than can directly tell what to do also you've got an organization that is so huge and has got so much going on look at what happened in glastonbury a couple of weeks ago there's literally endless streams of stuff going on who's across all this who is making sure that everything is working so it's an organization where things are looser and it is it than it is at other organisations and then therefore has a tendency for cock-ups to happen because the spotlight is so strongly on it.

12:21So do you think it is government overreach for a culture secretary to hint pretty strongly that she thinks Tim Davies' time is up? What I think is going on here, as well as the frustration that we've just talked about, is that it is definitely clear that the Labour Party sees reform snapping at its heels. And it does not want to look like a political party that whenever there is any question about the BBC, hasn't looked like it's on it. And I think in the past you wouldn't have seen that. I think when the people at the BBC were probably quite relieved that a new Labour administration came in and thought, great, people who tend to support us much more than the Conservative Party and certainly the reformer in charge, those people, I think, are increasingly feeling under pressure from populists they don't want to look like they're being weak and therefore do not feel that worried about slapping somebody down in these circumstances now so the government's response is not because of the bbc and what they've done it's because they might be outflanked by populists who might well i think two things are true i think genuinely they are frustrated why is it that every time there seems to be a crisis at the bbc it takes forever and it appears like people then just get moved off to be head of the archive or something like that.

13:39Why does that keep happening? And then I do think as well, they do feel that we have got reform snapping our heels and we cannot look like we're weak on these things and that we do need to look like that we are telling people what to do. I suspect it's also that there's probably been some private things that have gone on. There have been some private conversations that are bubbling to the surface in the interview that was done in the Times at the weekend. And this is Lisa Andy's way of saying, look, don't think that I won't make it hard for you if you don't start acting the way that I want you to.

14:10So a former executive of the BBC told me that they thought Nandy just hated Tories. I mean, just spelled it out like that. You know, Lisa Nandy hates Tories, has it inferred. Tim Davey isn't really looking at individual, you know, misaligned acts, just thinks that he shouldn't be there anymore. I think sounds to me like slight conspiracy. I mean, Tim Davies' background is that he has some connections to the Conservative Party in his past. I think he had some relationship in terms of a council or whatever. I think the idea for a politician that actually I suspect you're a Tory and therefore I want to bring you down, I don't really buy.

14:45I just don't get that. I think much more realistic is that they've clashed in private, that they found that they basically don't feel that they're doing what they want them to do sometimes. And I think it's a way of marking his card and saying, look, you cannot have a series of crises that go on and not have anybody asking you any tough or difficult questions. So should we talk about those crises? Every journalist I know, the struggle between how you tell the Gaza story, the Israel story, is a real and palpable one. Do you think that the BBC has got it more wrong than anyone? Or do you think they're just in the middle of an absolutely intractable issue?

15:23I don't think the BBC's got it more wrong than anyone. I think there's some great journalists. And I think that people like Jeremy Bowen and Lise Doucette have done a brilliant job in trying to articulate that story. When you think how pressurised that story is, by a country mile, the most sensitive issue that the BBC deals with. And I think on a day-to-day basis, the BBC's done a brilliant job. And if they hadn't, we'd have heard about it a lot more. The problem for the BBC has been in more peripheral and fringe things like Glastonbury, where why didn't somebody get, hang on a minute, these people are the support act for kneecap.

15:54Should we be showing it at all? And then when they do start saying certain things, why don't we just hit the cut button? I do think that that is a legitimate question for the BBC to face and had they thought this one through properly is a legitimate question and I think people feel look are you just being a bit too loose do you have too many outlets are you actually across it why not have somebody from News and Current Affairs come in and say look you do realize this is incredibly sensitive and we will be turned into a political football and that's the way I come at it I'm not regardless of the rights and wrongs of what Bob Villan said the BBC needs to be super sensitive to its reputation at the moment particularly at a time when reform is on the rise and that kind of thing they will be seen as a legitimate target so they need to go around shutting down any possibility that they can be seen open to criticism and i think showing bob villain from a straightforward reputational point of view was like a no-no they probably should have avoided it and as soon as there was any sign of trouble they should have hit the cup well i suppose the other thing that i've heard i mean you know emily crows former executive i know various people still there who say the problem with Tim Davy is that he's a marketeer by background and not a journalist and therefore doesn't see things quite as quickly as clearly about the pitfalls of something as maybe some others.

17:13Maybe that's an unfair criticism as well. Tim is a very sophisticated man. I know him well. Yes, he was a marketeer at PepsiCo, but you don't get to be Director General of the BBC without being very sophisticated. And you certainly don't last five years in the job without having some kind of sense of political antenna. He is in the kind of job where you attract problems and issues. He's also in charge of a huge organisation where those kind of issues are going to be in the limelight a lot of the time. So I think it is incredibly difficult for him. I suspect what happened is he turned up at Glastonbury.

17:46Somebody told him it was a problem. He said, make sure that doesn't get broadcast again. Then somebody said to him, look, you do realise that technically we're going to have to leave the feed running so somebody could rewind it and go back and look at it. And that's technically very difficult to stop. And I think he probably went, OK, just leave that bit. I think he regrets saying that. I haven't talked to him, but I think I've heard various things around it. And I suspect he probably looks back now and says, look, I wish we'd completely expunged it totally. We've all been in the BBC. And the sort of the leaving party joke was somebody go, morale in the newsroom's never been lower.

18:21And they'd be saying that for the last 30 years, right? There was always a line that morale at the BBC had never been lower. So I guess the question is, do you genuinely feel anything has changed? Or has it always been like this? And it's just that the noises off have become louder because there is more commercial pressure now. The BBC has always been in a position where it's going to be a political football. And there have been rounds all the way down the years. Two things I think are going on. it is stretching itself further and further it feels very very clearly that it needs to be a universal offering and that means it needs feels it needs to cover an entire landscape and it shouldn't with fewer resources my personal view is i think that they need to look much harder and say look we're going to concentrate some of this stuff but the argument against that is well you know if we're not appealing to certain groups then that's a problem personally i think that the time has come to say look we need to be a lot more selective in terms of but they can't shut things down i mean that's the other lesson you have in the video.

19:21Things don't really shut down. Yeah, but the other great joke is, isn't it, it's what you say about leaving do, so people in terms of morale, like anybody tries to shut anything down and suddenly there's this huge campaign and immediately somebody jumps up and goes, oh yes, of course, we couldn't possibly ever do without BBC Six. Well, we could. The world would not fall in end. The sky would not fall in. But the BBC has a tendency to say, oh, we must have all of this output all of the time. And that's problematic. the second thing that I think is the huge issue is somebody's pressed fast forward on the world haven't they things are coming at people much quicker in a social media environment these crises come along a lot more quickly they they're a lot louder a lot noisier and I think that the BBC is a natural magnet for those kind of crises and it is finding that in a time where it's more and more stretched more people more people are questioning it it is a natural magnet for crises And I think that that is something that they are really, really struggling with.

20:19Do I think that they always have the grip that they need to? No, I don't. I think that they sometimes are in avoidable situations. They do allow things to drag on for a long period of time. This Gaza documentary report should have been done and dusted and moved on very, very quickly. They clearly frustrate people. They look like they're marking their own homework. They look like that they're not taking them as seriously as possible. And that leads to politicians criticising. I mean, do you understand why you hear a lot of Jewish people say, I simply don't watch the BBC, I simply don't listen to the BBC anymore?

20:49I understand that. And I understand that people on the other side of the equation say that they're not treating Gaza seriously enough as a war crime. And we hear a lot of noise about Bob Villan and not enough about Gaza. It is an issue that by a country mile is the most difficult for the BBC. That means its news output is doing brilliantly, actually, in terms of managing that. but when the rest of the BBC gets involved it's a bit more cavalier and problematic and they are struggling in this world where social media everything's on fast forward populists on the rise people seeing them as a football all the time they are really really struggling with that great great to have you in thank you thank you very much

21:31and in a moment the 20th anniversary of 7-7 the first suicide bombings on British soil and the legacy it's left behind.

21:48Bite into a stacked sandwich made with hero bread or a fully loaded bagel. And the only thing you'll think is delicious. You won't think it's up to 19 grams of protein, but it is. You wouldn't believe it has 11 to 32 grams of fiber, but it does. Hero Bread makes loaves, buns, tortillas, bagels, and noodles packed with taste, but without all the net carbs. We're talking zero to five grams net carbs per serving. With Hero Bread, there are no compromises, just flavor. There's none of the stiff baked goods you'd expect from better for you brands. There's just the soft, fluffy bread you crave. Plus, small batch drops of indulgent favorites like the popular two gram net carb Hero Croissant and three gram net carb Hero Pen au Chocolat.

22:33And right now, Hero Bread is offering 10 % off your order. Go to hero.co and use code IHEART at checkout. That's code IHEART at H-E-R-O dot C-O. All figures for serving of Hero Bread. See nutrition facts on hero.co. This is The News Agents. Slightly unbelievably, it is now 20 years since the dreadful events of 7-7. And we want to spend most of our time talking about where we've got to now but where were you on 7-7 because we were both working journalists then I was the lead presenter for BBC London News and what I remember so clearly was covering the story of the Olympics the Olympic announcement we we had gone and done the whole broadcast the night before from Stratford East London which was going to be the big development and I can't tell you what that place felt like when we heard you know the envelope being opened the city of London it was that very slightly sort of Swiss awkward delivery and this amazing cheer went up and we were live we did the whole afternoon the evening broadcast from there and there was just this feeling of absolute magic in the air you know it was like we're good at this We're going to be amazing.

23:56There is hope. There is joy. There was just this real sense of palpable excitement that we'd gone and bid for the 2012 Olympics. And it had all come our way and nobody was expecting that. They all thought it was going to go to Paris. So we were just on this complete high, I think went to bed really late. And then the next morning was like somebody just just slamming the whole city into a wall. That's what it felt like. It felt like all the bubble and the FFS and the joy and the thing was just like smacked down as soon as I woke up. I think I was at the gym when we started getting messages in and Mark, my husband, had just gone to Heathrow to fly to Amsterdam.

24:41And I remember thinking, what if this is 9-11? What if this is airlines as well? What if, you know, I'm a natural catastrophist. So I'd already gone to the next place. And I think what people maybe don't realise or forget, or my kids wouldn't have known, was that now you look back, you can see the terror, but the containment of the terror. You can see 52 dead, horrendous numbers of injured and those four places. But when it was evolving, we just we didn't know if it was going to be four or 40. We didn't know if it was going to be trains and buses and planes. we didn't know if it was going to affect everyone you know in the city on that day yeah where were you well i was in paris because i've been there because of the expectation that paris was going to win the olympics i was a presenter on the news channel and i flew the next morning on the 7th early from paris to edinburgh which is where to gleneagles to gleneagles where the g8 was on and it was you know before smartphones so my phone had been turned off i turned it back on when we land at edinburgh airport and suddenly it's flashing new message new message new message new message new message and i'm thinking what the hell has happened since i've been on this flight and then you pick up one of the messages and the message was don't even leave the airport get the first flight you can back to london we need you in the studio and everyone was decamping and i I remember the US ambassador was on the same flight also coming back.

26:16I tried to get a lift in his motorcade that was going to sweep him into the city from Heathrow Airport. He couldn't do that. But, you know, it was that sense of everything has changed exactly as you describe it. Unimaginable, but yet imaginable because we had seen what happened with 9-11. And the idea that suicide bombers were detonating themselves in London on the tube network where, you know, I'm a Londoner born and brought up. in London, places you know so well, and the idea that this was happening in our capital city. So the weirdness was Tony Blair, who was Prime Minister at the time, was at Glen Eagles, and he had spent the night before glad-handing all the delegates, all the sort of G8 countries, because it was part of his pitch to the Olympics.

27:01And he was credited with having done a lot of sort of the mood music, creating the mood music, that got London over the line, even though that was, you know, an announcement that came from Singapore. There was this idea that he, you know, he had been doing the work up in Glen Eagles. And overnight he went from being the man who sort of won London the Olympics to being the man who was now head of a country hit by terror. And also a man who I think you could argue was facing questions about his own foreign policy and the links to that. And in the documentary that we're going to be discussing in a moment, in the Netflix documentary, he's actually asked, do you not accept that it was partly your war in Afghanistan, in Iraq, that led to this?

27:46And he answers sort of very judiciously, I thought, well, people may say that, but I'm the leader and I can't make policy on the back of what terrorists may or may not do. and obviously that's the correct answer. Obviously you can't make policy on the back of how terrorists may respond but I think that it left a looming sense for many that it had been brought on. Yes, they were criminals, they were absolute murderous criminals who had been fed a propaganda and an ideology not least from some of the more extremist Muslim clerics in this country and all that was true. But there was this sort of really uncomfortable sense of, well, how much has our government led us to this place?

28:37Just kind of before we... I mean, a personal recollection. I remember, you know, obviously my kids are that bit older. Yours were kind of presumably just... Only had one. Only had one at that stage. I remember my kids having to be picked up early from school. Schools were shutting down. And of course, the last thing you were going to do is to put them on the tube or on a bus to go home. So the kids were collected. And I remember we lived relatively near the Royal Free Hospital. Just the endless ambulances going up and down the sirens, the two-tones of the ambulances heading to the hospital, ferrying the injured to there.

29:15It was kind of something that stays with you for some time. I remember London on its feet because we couldn't, you know, I went into work, obviously, to BBC London, which was in Marlebone, and there were no buses, there were no tubes, the networks were shut, most of the phone networks were off. And so everyone was on this really weird, sober pilgrimage. The whole of London was walking. And I walked, I lived down by, I think, Barron's Court at the time, and I remember walking like an hour and 45 minutes, you know. I turned up, you know, in jeans and trainers. It was that sort of day. And I remember the people we spoke to over the following three weeks.

29:57And I mean, this sounds really obvious, but they were us. You know, they were all of us. But for the grace of God. Well, you know, but for a minute, but for a stop, but for a change of line, but for a delay. There was a woman who lost her legs. And I remember she used to watch me on BBC London News. And I remember her pulling me as, you know, as one of our survivor interviews. And she said, Emily, do you know what? I'm really going to miss my shoes. And she knew that she'd sort of make me like cry and laugh at the same time. She's like, you get that, don't you? What am I going to do with my shoes?