BBC board member with Tory link 'led the charge' over claims of bias

Call for Robbie Gibb to lose role as Trump threatens $1bn lawsuit

- Michael Savage Media editor

Deborah Turness outside the BBC's Broadcasting House in London yesterday after resigning as head of BBC News

(LEON NEAL/GETTY IMAGES)

A BBC board member with links to the Conservative party “led the charge” in pressuring the corporation’s leadership over claims of systemic bias in coverage of Donald Trump, Gaza and trans rights, the Guardian has been told.

Sources said that Robbie Gibb, Theresa May’s former communications chief who was appointed to the BBC’s board during Boris Johnson’s administration, amplified the criticisms in key board meetings that preceded the shock resignation of the director general, Tim Davie, and the head of BBC News, Deborah Turness.

In an article for the Guardian, the Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, called for Gibb to be removed from the BBC’s board before the search for a new director general began.

On another extraordinary day for the BBC, Trump threatened it with a billion-dollar legal action after criticism of the way an edition of Panorama more than a year ago had edited one of his speeches.

The legal letter demands that “false, defamatory, disparaging, and inflammatory statements” made about Trump must be retracted immediately.

The edit was one of the subjects of criticism raised in a memo by Michael Prescott, a former independent external adviser to the BBC's editorial guidelines and standards committee. He left that role in the summer.

After a week in which the BBC's leadership has been criticised by its own staff for failing to respond to Prescott's claims, the corporation's chair, Samir Shah, apologised yesterday for the Trump edit.

Shah blamed an "error of judgment" over the way the programme spliced together two parts of a speech by Trump made before the attack on the US Capitol in January 2021.