Emily Maitlis says ‘active Tory party agent’ shaping BBC news output

Emily Maitlis has said a BBC board member is an “active agent of the Conservative party” who is shaping the broadcaster’s news output by acting “as the arbiter of BBC impartiality”.

The former Newsnight presenter highlighted the role of Sir Robbie Gibb, who previously worked as Theresa May’s director of communications and helped to found the rightwing GB News channel.

Last year he was appointed to the BBC’s board by Boris Johnson’s government and has since influenced a series of ongoing reviews of the broadcaster’s editorial output.

Maitlis also raised concerns about the BBC’s relationship with the Conservative government, saying the broadcaster went out of its way to “pacify” Downing Street after she criticised Dominic Cummings for his breach of lockdown rules during the pandemic.

The presenter said the corporation’s bosses panicked after Maitlis told Newsnight viewers in 2020 that Johnson’s former aide had “broken the rules” and “the country can see that, and it’s shocked the government cannot”.

Maitlis said the programme initially “passed off with a few pleasant texts from BBC editors and frankly little else”.

She added: “It was only the next morning that the wheels fell off. A phone call of complaint was made from Downing Street to the BBC News management. This, for context, is not unusual.

“What was not foreseen was the speed with which the BBC sought to pacify the complainant. Within hours, a very public apology was made, the programme was accused of a failure of impartiality, the recording disappeared from iPlayer, and there were paparazzi outside my front door.

“Why had the BBC immediately and publicly sought to confirm the government spokesman’s opinion? Without any kind of due process? It makes no sense for an organisation that is admirably, famously rigorous about procedure – unless it was perhaps sending a message of reassurance directly to the government itself?

“Put this in the context of the BBC Board, where another active agent of the Conservative party – former Downing Street spin doctor, and former adviser to BBC rival GB News – now sits, acting as the arbiter of BBC impartiality.”

Maitlis, who left the BBC earlier this year to make a podcast for commercial broadcaster LBC, made the comments while delivering the MacTaggart memorial lecture at the Edinburgh international television festival.

Reflecting on her time at the BBC, Maitlis said the corporation often slipped into a “both-sides-ism” approach to impartiality that gave a platform to individuals that did not deserve airtime.

She recalled how during the 2016 EU referendum the BBC would create a false equivalence by putting one pro-Brexit economist on air to debate with one anti-Brexit economist, even though the overwhelming majority of economists felt Brexit was a bad idea.

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Acknowledging her own mistakes while seeking to achieve impartiality, she also said attacks on the media can cause journalists to “censor our own interviews to avoid the backlash”.

Maitlis warned that the traditional media is becoming increasingly afraid to stand up for itself in an era where “facts are getting lost, constitutional norms trashed, claims frequently unchallenged”.

She said “sections of both the BBC and government-supporting newspapers appear to go into an automatic crouch position whenever the Brexit issue looms large”.

Despite queues at the British border and economic issues piling up, such outlets are still reluctant to discuss the impact of Brexit “in case they get labelled pessimistic, anti-populist, or worse still, as above: unpatriotic”.

She added: “And yet every day that we sidestep these issues with glaring omissions feels like a conspiracy against the British people; we are pushing the public further away. Why should our viewers, our listeners, come to us to interpret and explain what is going on when they can see our own reluctance to do so?”

With her new podcast with the BBC’s former North America editor Jon Sopel, titled The News Agents, due to launch next week, Maitlis warned while journalists do not have to be campaigners they should avoid being “complaisant, complicit onlookers”.

She concluded: “Our job is to make sense of what we are seeing and anticipate the next move. It’s the moment, in other words, the frog should be leaping out of the boiling water and phoning all its friends to warn them. But by then we are so far along the path of passivity, we’re cooked.”