2 days ago
Tim Davie must surely fall on his sword now
Has anybody seen Tim Davie? Ever since the BBC beamed death chants from Glastonbury into millions of sitting-rooms around the country, its director-general has been conspicuous by his absence. Could he be lying low in the hope that the storm will pass, leaving the broadcaster free to return to business as usual?
I'd wager my house on it. And frankly, I wouldn't blame him. This evening, it emerged that the boss of the Beeb personally decided not to delete the livestream of the Glastonbury death chants from iPlayer while – get this – at the festival himself.
How could an otherwise sensitive and adroit operator make a decision of such catastrophic proportions? Was he thinking that Middle England would have no problem with death chants at Glasto? Mind you, he probably did believe that, as none of his own friends would have objected. Well, now his fingerprints are all over it.
From the Cliff Richards scandal of 2014 to the revelations about Auntie showcasing Hamas propaganda more than a decade later, whenever its journalism is under the spotlight, the Beeb only has one playbook.
First, ignore. Then deny. Then defend. Then ignore some more. Finally, when there is truly nothing else to be done, squeeze out an apology in an equivocal and mealy-mouthed manner and hope everybody forgets about it.
I remember the battle the Jewish community had in 2022, when the BBC alleged that a bunch of kids celebrating Chanukah in London had brought an antisemitic assault upon their own heads by using an 'anti-Muslim slur'.
The corporation dug its heels in for months, even after the Board of Deputies had commissioned a forensic audio expert to prove that no such 'slur' had been uttered. Eventually, when it was condemned by Ofcom, the BBC apologised. And everybody moved on.
Not this time. The director-general has been left holding this depraved baby of woke-jihad and he ain't going to get it adopted that quick. Not since the Jimmy Savile scandal have we seen public anger so intense as at the mishandling of Glastonbury, which had quite obviously become a disaster of exactly this sort waiting to happen.
In the extensive run-up to the music festival – music festival? Let's call it a carnival of cranks – the BBC repeatedly toadied up to the Eavis clan, which has openly converted the event into a hormone-fuelled display of adolescent politics.
When Bob Vylan – could there be a more contemptible character? – commenced to overtake even Kneecap in the leaderboard of jawdropping bloodlust, the BBC embraced its true desires and let the nation have it.
Doubtless, Davie and his cronies will insist that the view from Broadcasting House is more complicated than that. In a way, they have a point; the BBC is a vast and unwieldy organisation, with its Glastonbury coverage alone involving hundreds of employees and eyewatering sums of licence fee payers' money.
Its management structure is such that every decision is taken by an unnecessary number of people, all of whom are able to drop their lanyards and melt away when the going goes rotten. Cock-ups certainly play a part in every debacle and people aren't consciously intending to do away with the Reithian principles.
The problem, however, is that the whole edifice is built on progressive dreams. The BBC may understand its obligation to impartiality, but the vast majority of folks leading the organisation hail from the same centrist fundamentalist milieu.
They may feel obligated to give some Brexity voice some airtime, for example, but they will all go and have a shower afterwards. They may invite an Israeli spokesman onto a programme, but they won't be able to hold back the barracking. When they make a cock-up, in other words, it always points in the same direction.
Part of Davie's job has always been to defend the BBC from the voice of common sense. I had a go myself when I bumped into him at an event – a Chanukah party, ironically – a little while back.
I was mainly critical of the corporation's coverage of the war in Gaza, which has played a disgraceful role in stoking the type of mindless, jihadi-adjacent fever that we saw at Glastonbury.
If any war, whether in Sudan, Yemen or Ukraine, had been treated with such wall-to-wall coverage of civilian casualties on one side by our national broadcaster, public opinion would have been greatly swayed, I said, not to mention if the BBC had consistently amplified terrorist propaganda to boot.
So far as I can recall, Davie's response involved two main arguments. First, he believed that since the corporation was also criticised by jihadi sympathisers for being to pro-Israeli, it had 'got the balance about right'. The fact that one side was objectively correct and the other was sectarian and wrong didn't seem to make any difference.
The second argument, which was most tactfully made, was that Right-wingers are going to criticise the Beeb whatever it does. These two principles allowed him to essentially engage in no self-reflection whatsoever, nodding and smiling and while looking for someone else to talk to.
It was like he was on magic mushrooms. Well, this evening should bring the man down to Earth with a bump. Israel's deputy foreign minister, Sharren Haskel, had already called for Davie's head to roll even before he was found with the smoking gun. It seems unlikely that he can save himself now.
