Huw Edwards scandal: Shock, anger and damage limitation in the BBC
Written by BBC on September 15, 2024
When I started at BBC News three years ago, a work friend gave me some advice about my new colleague Huw Edwards.
“You can be funny,” they said. “But don’t be funnier than Huw.
“You can be clever, but don’t be too clever.”
It was a light-hearted warning about a presenter who, back then, was top of the pack, highly regarded by many in the newsroom for his brilliance, his wit and his diligent professionalism.
But in the past year, Edwards has gone from being king of the BBC newsroom – paid almost as much as the director general – to a convicted sex offender who on Monday will be sentenced for making indecent images of children.
He has admitted having 41 indecent images, which had been sent to him by another man on WhatsApp. They included seven category A images – the most serious classification. Two involved a child aged about seven to nine.
All the abused children in these images have experienced the worst of humanity. They are victims of depravity.
Before we learnt of his offences, there had been a lingering sympathy for Edwards from some colleagues.
Discovering that the presenter was guilty of such horrendous crimes rocked people in the newsroom to their core.
One BBC staffer speaks of “feeling sick”.
Another describes it as “a bombshell”.
“We were frozen watching those images of him wearing his sunglasses walking to court. Was it defiance? Was it shame? Nobody knows.
“There’s upset and anger at what he’s done, the levels he’s fallen to, how it’s impacted the rest of us and what it’s done to the BBC.”
For staff, particularly those who worked alongside him, it’s been a difficult year.
“There have been so many twists and turns, it has felt like a blow every time another horror has been unveiled. It has felt unending.”
When the Sun newspaper published its revelations in July 2023 about an unnamed presenter paying a “young person” for sexually explicit images, there was shock.
Many of us knew from the start that the presenter was Edwards because he had disappeared from the presenting rota.
It was a testing story for me and my colleagues to cover.
Every word we said and wrote was scrutinised and yet we knew so little about the facts ourselves. Supported by brilliant producers and editors, I reported the story as I understood it.
But many – both inside and outside the BBC – argued Edwards’ privacy had been invaded. And having to report about a colleague – not just any colleague but the face of News at Ten – was relentless.
When his name was revealed, and we learned of his mental health struggles and that the police said there had been no criminality in that case, some even felt sympathy and concern.
Then for nine months we heard nothing official – until a terse statement in April that he had resigned from the BBC.
With no warm words about Edwards in that statement, there was a clue that relations had entirely broken down. Even so, nobody was prepared for what was to come.
BBC chair Samir Shah told the House of Lords’ communications and digital committee last week that he and other colleagues “feel angry and betrayed”.
When he sent an email to staff after we learned that Edwards had been charged and pleaded guilty, he called the former broadcaster “the villain of this piece”.
A senior insider told me: “No-one wants to be in a situation where your flagship presenter, known up and down the country, and the voice of trust in everyone’s household, is convicted of a crime of this nature.
“It’s so far from your radar of things you might have to deal with.”
I understand there was widespread fury in the senior team that Edwards had denied all wrongdoing while he knew he’d had images of serious child abuse on his mobile phone.
Both staff and management feel bruised.
Edwards has been involved in serious offences involving children. We must never forget the victims of these crimes.
Edwards is the criminal, not the BBC, although some suspect he is being used as a way to bash the organisation for ideological reasons.
As one senior insider put it to me, with a heavy dose of sarcasm, “at the end of the day, it’s always the BBC’s fault”.
But the corporation has faced some important questions through this bruising year.
It has asked Edwards to return about £200,000 paid to him in the five months after he was arrested before he resigned.
But why did it continue to pay his salary once top brass knew of the arrest? Some HR and legal voices have told me that the BBC behaved appropriately, balancing its duty of care and contractual responsibilities to an employee with wider reputational concerns.
But director general Tim Davie, speaking to the Lords committee, questioned whether the BBC could have been “more muscular in the situation with regard to payment”.
A very small group of senior people knew about the arrest in November (and we’re told the police had asked the BBC to keep it confidential).
They were informed that some of the images were category A, although they did not suspect the photographs involved such young children. The Sun story concerned a young person who was 17 initially – that context led to a belief that the images involved older teens.
Even so, they knew the images included category A photographs. BBC News staff I’ve spoken to, including senior people, do not believe that the civil enforcement of an employment contract would have kept him in his job, when the allegations were so serious.
A “more muscular” approach, certainly in hindsight, would have helped protect the BBC’s reputation.
The disciplinary process the BBC launched into Edwards after the Sun claims – including details of other allegations made about him – has never been published. I have been told that’s standard across organisations, but it’s led to accusations of a lack of transparency.
The BBC has launched an independent review to strengthen workplace culture. The chair told staff he is “particularly exercised by the continuing problem of how we handle bad behaviour by those in power at the BBC”.
Some I have spoken to say they don’t feel reassured.
“The review that was done into the complaints made against him has been suppressed. So there’s no faith. It’s convenient for the BBC that he doesn’t work for the BBC any more. So they’ve done away with it.”
One senior figure rejects the idea of “a huge backlash about that”.
Another insider points to the “complex” power structures in media organisations where managers have power but the “talent” are also powerful because of their influence and status.
“The companies who employ them have to be even more vigilant, and on top of those power dynamics.”
When Edwards boarded a train from Edinburgh to London after presenting the News at Ten from the Scottish capital on 5 July 2023, his career and his place in TV history seemed secure.
He’d negotiated a £40,000 payrise taking his salary up to more than £475,000. He was so trusted by the BBC, he’d been chosen as the person to announce the death of the Queen.
A talented pianist, he’d also been announced as a new face of the BBC Proms and was due to appear on the One Show that week to talk about it.
His appearance was shelved. He would not host his first Prom, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, and he had presented the news for the last time.
In a face-to-face meeting the day after presenting from Edinburgh, Edwards was told of the Sun’s claims. A few days later, he was suspended.
Just last week, he apparently updated his Linkedin profile to say he is “available for no charge to charities and not-for-profit organisations” (the profile appears to have since been deleted).
That raised eyebrows among some colleagues – an insight perhaps into the mind of someone they once thought they knew.
When he presented the News at Ten, Edwards would sit on a bank of desks in the middle of the newsroom, opposite whoever was editing the Six and Ten o’clock news programmes.
With his long-standing journalistic pedigree and status in the BBC firmament, colleagues deferred to him and, editorially, he often got his way.
That’s fairly common with the big beasts of broadcasting, and there was nobody bigger than Edwards.
When my friend warned me, as I took up my job, to keep him on side, it made me think of Henry VIII in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, with Edwards a TV presenter Tudor monarch.
“You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him,” Mantel writes in Bring Up The Bodies.
But courtiers compare Henry VIII to a tamed lion.
“You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you’re thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.”
