The resignations of BBC Director General Tim Davie and News Director Deborah Turney over Panorama editing of United States President Donald Trump’s 2021 speech have plunged the United Kingdom’s national broadcaster into one of the deepest crises in its history.
But this scam did not start with a single program or a single wrong decision. Near the center of this crisis is Robbie Gibb, a man who has spent more than a decade shaping the BBC’s political coverage, zig-zagging between the BBC and the Conservative government while pursuing his own partisan project that has distorted the corporation’s journalism on Brexit, Trump and ultimately Gaza.
I saw the impact of that firsthand when the BBC delayed and then removed our film on Gaza doctors. What is unfolding today is simply the moment when a long-running pattern of interference has become fully public.
Gibb has been such a prominent figure in public life in Britain for so long that it is a relief that he is now being publicly named and discussed. Until the Panorama scandal and the resignations that led to it, he was rarely scrutinized outside political and media circles. Now he is suddenly in the spotlight and the subject of heated debate on social media, as people try to understand how an unelected man came to wield so much influence.
It is hard to think of anyone who has had a more widespread influence on British public life without any accountability, from within both Number 10 and the BBC. Gibb has arguably been the most influential but hidden enabler of Brexit politics, the Conservative Party and Israel, while also serving two of the country’s most important institutions such as head of the BBC’s Westminster team, head of press at Number 10 and then as a key BBC board member influencing BBC News. There has been little change in his guiding motivations or methodology between these roles, just a firm belief that only he can hold the line against the highly liberal and left-leaning BBC “wokeness” and ensure impartiality. But in doing so, they have destroyed any perception of it, leading to a decline in the credibility of the BBC’s coverage of the current crisis, the $1 billion battle with Trump and Gaza.
As editor of Channel 4 News from 2012 to 2022, I had Gibb’s experience from the time he was appointed press secretary at No. 10 in 2017. His tendency to manage political reporting in ways that advance his own political project was evident from the beginning. From the beginning, while he severely restricted Channel 4 News’ access to government ministers, this access remained freely available to the BBC and reflected the close relationships he had built up during his years overseeing parts of its political output. Gibb was known inside the BBC for his long-standing support for Brexit, having supported the issue since working for the Conservative Party from 1997 to 2002. His conduct at Number 10 seemed slightly different from his BBC years; Their direct control over output was replaced by bargaining over access, which helped them shape British politics. And he had all the BBC political staff on speed dial.
Relations worsened in 2018 when Channel 4 News became the first broadcaster to cover the Windrush scandal. It was revealed that hundreds of black British citizens, most of whom had arrived from the Caribbean more than 50 years ago, had been wrongly detained, deported and denied legal rights. The scandal resulted from policies implemented by Theresa May in her previous role as Home Secretary. As we continued to report on the rising number of elderly victims, Gibb reacted furiously. He blocked Channel 4 News from interviews with the Prime Minister and other ministers, reportedly telling colleagues that we were “talking about something no one cares about”.
They then extended that ban to the Conservative Party Conference, locking us out of the traditional round of prime ministerial interviews that had been offered for decades. Every other broadcaster, including the BBC, signed a letter warning that the ban sets a dangerous precedent. A former BBC colleague of Gibb’s approached me afterwards at the conference and said he was “going crazy, he’s absolutely furious”.
Several BBC journalists told me at the time that Gibb was still effectively directing parts of the BBC’s political coverage from Number 10, using his influence and long-term relationships to shape what was reported and who gained access. Many said they had difficulty distinguishing between Gibb at the BBC and Gibb at Number 10 as he continued to exert influence over important decisions. One of the major benefits for Number 10 was Gibb’s influence on the BBC’s post-Brexit coverage. Unlike Channel 4 News, which pursued Vote Leave and the Cambridge Analytica investigation, the BBC decided not to look back and investigate what happened during the referendum. Several BBC colleagues later told me that this reluctance to investigate the referendum was not new, but it reflected how Gibb had acted in real time when he oversaw the BBC’s political output during the campaign.
In 2019, we obtained emails between major Brexit donor Arron Banks and Gibb in the run-up to the referendum. The emails revealed that Banks had complained to Gibb about the BBC investigation of Leave. The EU attempted to build support within far-right online communities and asked Gibb to intervene. After Banks expressed his concerns to Gibb, the investigation was closed. The BBC said the story did not meet editorial standards, but weeks later, the same investigation was published by The Sunday Times. Banks also told Gibb that Nigel Farage does not appear on the BBC enough. In the months leading up to the referendum, Farage appeared repeatedly in the broadcaster’s output.
In 2019, after Gibb left Number 10 with Theresa May, Boris Johnson appointed him to the BBC board, an influential position from which he had no right to interfere in day-to-day editorial decisions. Despite this, several allegations emerged that he continued to do so, including attempts to block appointments, visits to newsrooms and repeated involvement in editorial matters. In 2020, he took a controlling interest in the Jewish Chronicle – the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper, a newspaper long considered the voice of Britain’s Jewish community – on behalf of undisclosed supporters and the newspaper then shifted sharply to the right. Several of its most respected journalists resigned amid allegations that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was influencing its coverage. All this occurred while Gibb, as the most experienced editorial voice on the BBC board, was reportedly exerting an increasingly powerful influence, despite board rules prohibiting direct editorial involvement. In Gibb’s case, old habits apparently died hard.
Following the horrific Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s two-year-long ongoing assault on Gaza, which has destroyed much of the Palestinian territory and killed more than 70,000 people, including 20,000 children, I was told by multiple sources that Gibb, as the strongest editorial voice on the BBC board, had been putting BBC News under pressure over its Israel coverage from the beginning. Pressure reached its peak in February, when the BBC aired the film Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone and then withdrew it.
The film was produced externally and failed to disclose that its 13-year-old narrator’s father was deputy agriculture minister in Gaza’s Hamas-run government. Subsequently, the BBC delayed our investigation into Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system and the killing of more than 1,500 doctors, offering various excuses until finally admitting that they would not run it while they investigated another film. This was an extraordinary and unprecedented decision that effectively silenced and blunted their coverage. It was only after we went public that Gaza: Doctors Under Attack finally aired, not on the BBC but on Channel 4.
I was told that under Gibb’s influence the board effectively induced Tim Davie and Deborah Turnness to first obscure their position on our film, then ask us to make significant changes, before finally saying they would only run three one-minute clips from our 65-minute investigation on their news outlets. It was a film about hospitals being bombed and evacuated, doctors and medical workers and their families being targeted and killed, and hundreds of others being detained and tortured. It had already been approved by the BBC and subsequently ran on Channel 4 – and Mehdi Hassan’s new media platform, Zeteo – without complaint. It has since been nominated for several awards and has now started winning.
In the end, it seems that Davy and Turneys fell not because they stood up to Gibb, but because they reacted too slowly to the crisis their world had helped create. After years of pressure on Gaza and growing complaints about bias, the misleading panorama editing of Trump’s speech and his hesitant response to his legal and political attack became the final straw. Only Gibb knows whether it was his intention to push the BBC into a situation where it now faces a potential billion-dollar lawsuit from the sitting US President, but his influence and alliances were central to the series of decisions that got there. And now, hiding in plain sight, Gibb’s decades-long mission to reshape the national broadcaster around his own political agenda dressed up as a defense of impartiality can finally be seen to have ended: a complete disaster for the BBC and the public it is meant to serve.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Al Jazeera.
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