However, I strongly disagree with her attack during her speech at the Edinburgh Television Festival on both the BBC and board member (albeit anonymous) Robbie Gibb. As you hear on your first day as a BBC employee, the Corporation is in the enviable position of receiving huge sums of public money in the form of the license fee, and with that comes an obligation, beyond what the law requires, to be impartial and precise. The BBC also has a duty to reflect the diversity of opinion in the country from the very people who pay staff salaries. For no one is this more true than the presenters who become the public face of the company’s production. In her first speech since leaving Newsnight, Emily Maitlis said she was the victim of outside interference in the BBC’s coverage after she was found to have breached editorial guidelines in 2020 when she criticized then No 10 aide Dominic Cummings for his ill-fated trip . at Barnard Castle. He claimed the decision was the result of government pressure. The BBC was clear – then and now – that this is simply not true. As any BBC presenter knows, however strongly they feel about any political story, it’s simply not their place to judge. Maitlis went on, in the same speech, to claim that the BBC gave undue exposure to economists who believed Brexit offered opportunities for Britain. Although this was a minority view among professional economists at the time, the role of those working at the BBC is to reflect the range of views on any controversial issue. Whatever my view or her view on Brexit, on Dominic Cummings or anything else for that matter, people don’t pay us for our opinion as BBC presenters. We may be able to present our views on other channels, including GB News and Talk TV, but not on the Beeb. I have only recently met Sir Robbie Gibb, but his fearsome reputation as a defender of the impartiality of the BBC, and the company in general, is long and well known. He would not have been promoted to cover Westminster if there was the slightest question about his independence. Claiming, as Emily Maitlis puts it, that he “acts as an active agent of the Conservative Party” in his role on the board perhaps says more about her politics than his. It’s definitely good publicity for her upcoming Global podcast. And what is always missing from this debate is that it is BBC staff who are most frustrated when their former colleagues misuse the Corporation’s great platform to promote their own agenda. I have myself criticized aspects of the corporation in the past – most recently its decision to merge the two news channels – but always from the point of view that the BBC is a national asset that should be valued by those lucky enough to work there and defend of us who are gone. Emily Maitley’s speech does an injustice to the thousands of BBC staff, nationally and locally, who pride themselves on journalism that rises above political controversy. Simon McCoy worked at the BBC for 17 years, including as presenter of the flagship BBC News on One
