There was a moment at the Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) committee hearing last week into the BBC’s recent convulsions when the body language seemed to drown out the words spoken. At the long tables in front of MPs sat three BBC board members, among them the chair, Samir Shah, and one of its political appointees, Sir Robbie Gibb.
“Can I clarify something?” asked the Labour MP Natasha Irons. “...Sir Robbie, did you have any role in Dr Shah becoming chair?” The normally forceful voice of Gibb dimmed to something too faint to be recorded in the official transcript (he “indicated dissent”, it says) and he smiled boyishly. Shah jumped in: “The chair is a public appointment,” he said, as if that answered the question.
Irons pressed on. “Yes, but I was wondering whether there were any conversations. Were your views canvassed in any way?” When he worked at the BBC, Gibb commissioned Shah’s independent TV and radio production company, Juniper, to make political programmes.
Gibb turned awkwardly towards Shah and, again, muttered something which the microphones could not pick up (this time, too indistinct even for the transcript to give a gist). He took a glug of water, and in the air hung a question: is there something more we should know about the process which led to Samir Shah being appointed BBC chair?
To answer that question, it helps to know a little about Professor Robert Tombs. As a historian, he is bound to appreciate more than most people that some answers emerge very slowly. “We sent in a report to the BBC which, as far as I was aware, they had completely ignored,” he told The Observer last week.
“It seemed they were discussing it but decided to do nothing about it. I was very surprised that we got a mention in the culture committee on Monday.” Tombs is a leading light in History Reclaimed, a group of academics which sets its face against “the abuse of history for political purposes” and its use as “a vehicle for facile propaganda”.
In December 2022, it published “Can we trust the BBC with our history?” The answer was no. In its own words, the report “does not purport to be a comprehensive survey of all the BBC’s output but serves to demonstrate how the BBC often strays from its stated objectives through its consistent bias”. It focused on six case studies: three to do with Britain’s history in slavery and slave trading; two concerning Britain’s role in the Irish and Bengal famines; and one about the return to Nigeria of some Benin bronzes. In the wake of battles over the statues of Edward Colston in Bristol and Cecil Rhodes in Oxford, these were all areas where history met, head on, arguments about empire, culture and identity.
Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Lisa Nandy
The report’s conclusions were deeply critical but it caused barely a ripple. The BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee considered it at a meeting in January 2023, but there is no record of any discussion after that, or any action taken.
The efforts of one man, Michael Prescott, have brought it back to the surface. Prescott is the former BBC editorial adviser who compiled a dossier of allegations of bias at the BBC which was leaked to the Daily Telegraph and eventually led to the resignations of the director-general and chief executive of news. Personal relationships matter in this story, so it is worth recalling that a senior BBC insider told The Observer that Prescott was “encouraged” to apply for the job at the BBC by his friend, Gibb who, in turn, had been appointed to its board by Boris Johnson. (Prescott was also on the interview panel for the chair of the media regulator Ofcom).
When he gave evidence to the committee last Monday, Prescott referred, approvingly, to History Reclaimed’s report, as he had in his dossier.
It is not a surprise that Prescott remembered it – he was at the BBC’s editorial standards committee in January 2023, along with Gibb, when it was discussed – but The Observer has learned that it was spotted in government, too, and seems somehow to have lodged in the memory there.
In August 2023, an advert went out for the job of chair of the BBC board; 37 people applied and 10 were shortlisted.
What followed was a process in two parts: a standard interview panel chaired by a senior civil servant, and a “fireside chat”’ with the secretary of state for culture, media and sport, Lucy Frazer. The panel’s only job was to assess if candidates got over the threshold to being appointable, not to rank them in any order – so the fireside chat would be decisive.
Before it, The Observer understands, some candidates were shown a copy of the History Reclaimed report, and told they would be asked by Frazer what they would do about it if they got the job, while others were not. None of the candidates who were shown the report has been prepared to comment; the belief of others is that it was used as a wedge to decide if applicants were on the “right side” of the culture wars or not.
Who might have decided to resurrect a largely unnoticed History Reclaimed report to put it into service in the hunt for a new BBC chair? The answer is difficult to winkle out because, while the formal interviews for the job are minuted, the business end of the process – the fireside chats – is not. And to muddy the waters further, the job search is run by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) – one of many public appointments it makes each year – but this is a big one: a “No 10 job”. There is no pretence that the outcome is anything other than the prime minister’s decision. Unsuccessful candidates were told they could have feedback if they wanted it – from a special adviser in 10 Downing Street.
Shah eventually emerged from this convoluted process as the new chair of the BBC board. He had gone into it with credentials which would have placed him on the “right side” of debates about the treatment of history, thanks to his time at the Geffrye Museum (now the Museum of the Home) where he chaired the board until 2022. In 2020, a row had blown up over what to do with a statue of Robert Geffrye at the museum once his links to the slave trade had been revealed. A public consultation found a majority in favour of taking the statue down but in October that year the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, threatened the museum’s funding if it did so. Shah chaired the board which decided to “retain and explain” the statue instead; retain and explain was the government’s policy.
‘There’s a problem with the public having confidence in BBC neutrality when you have political board appointments’
Lisa Nandy, culture secretary
Inside the BBC, over the period these debates were playing out, The Observer has been told that more than one chair of the BBC board – and fellow directors and BBC executives – became irritated by the “personal hotline” Gibb kept open to Conservative secretaries of state for culture, media and sport.
In front of MPs last week, Gibb said he found the suggestion that he had been part of a coup that led to the exit of the BBC director-general and head of news both “offensive” and “nonsense”.
He was not sure what he was accused of, he said. Inside the BBC, they are: political interference. The belief is that Gibb is political, not just with a capital P as the communications director for prime minister Theresa May, knighted for political service, but political with a small p, too. As evidence, critics point to examples such as his efforts to extend board oversight of impartiality into areas such as popular drama and his willingness to weigh in on editorial appointments in BBC News.
Shah said he spoke to Gibb, when he was thinking of applying for the chair’s job. It would have been odd if he had not, given they had previously worked together. The live question now is whether Gibb remains on the board while it decides on the appointment of the next director-general.
Through all this, the BBC finds itself in an invidious position; not only an institution which plays home to debates about the culture wars, but part of the battlefield. How does it escape that trap?
On the BBC’s Newsnight last week, the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, pulled a surprise: “I do think there’s a problem with the public having confidence that the BBC is a neutral and independent institution when you’ve got political appointments being made to the board so that is something we intend to look at as a government through the process of renewing the BBC’s charter.” The deadline for BBC charter renewal is New Year’s Eve 2027.
Photograph by PA images/Alamy, Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing via Getty Images