Dear Madam/Sir,
As a long-time critic of the BBC, let me spell it out. What we’re seeing right now isn’t organic outrage – it’s a sophisticated coordinated campaign by ideological enemies and commercial competitors to undermine the BBC’s independence and funding. If you can’t see that, you’re being played – and that’s exactly the point.
Michael Prescott, author of the dodgy dossier leaked exclusively to The Telegraph, is a former political editor at Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times with deep ties to Conservative communications, including friendship with BBC board member and ex-Tory spin chief Robbie Gibb, who influenced his 2022 appointment to the BBC’s impartiality panel.
In 2021, the FT reported that then PM Boris Johnson had been accused of creating a conflict of interest after appointing Prescott – a lobbyist from the Hanover Communications PR agency that advises media companies including Sky and and represents Oracle, Apple, Meta and Paramount – a roster that spans the core of Big Tech, US entertainment and news media – to help select the next Ofcom chair. Prescott was appointed as a senior external interviewer to advise Sue Gray, the official who was running the recruitment process for the new Ofcom chair.
Jean Seaton, director of the Orwell Foundation and professor of media history at Westminster university, also raised concerns about Hanover’s connections with Sky. “Sky has a direct interest in the BBC being smaller”, she said.
As an interesting aside, Priti Patel and Prescott worked at Weber Shandwick, a major lobbying/PR firm, between June 2001 and 2003, with both working in the public affairs division, though no direct collaboration is documented. Patel handled EU tobacco advocacy, while Prescott built the public affairs unit.
The weaponisation of ‘impartiality’
Prescott’s dodgy dossier selectively amplified right-wing flashpoints like the Panorama Trump speech edits and Gaza coverage while ignoring left-wing flashpoints – such as when, during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, a 2019 episode of Panorama titled Is Labour Anti-Semitic? edited an interview with Izzy Lenga to remove any references to the far right, falsely implying that the antisemitic abuse she suffered came exclusively from Labour members.
Here’s what was broadcast:
“I’m Izzy Lenga, I joined the Labour Party in 2015 … The antisemitic abuse I received was what I was subjected to every single day … Telling me Hitler was right, telling me Hitler did not go far enough … It absolutely breaks my heart to say but I do not think the Labour Party is a safe space for Jewish people anymore.”
Edited out of the interview were these words:
“Predictably a lot of it came from the far right … neo-Nazi abuse.”
As edited by Panorama, Lenga’s interview was presented in a way that implied she was told “Hitler was right, Hitler did not go far enough” every day by people in the Labour Party. The BBC later admitted that the edit had “mixed up” sources and accepted that this specific quote came from a single far right neo-Nazi incident in 2015 during her time as a student at Birmingham University – not from Labour members at all. The ‘every day’ abuse referred instead to the general online antisemitic trolling she faced as a high-profile Jewish activist, not to events inside the party.
The new chair and an old playbook
Let’s talk about the current BBC chair, sometimes framed as an “anti-woke” secular Muslim immigrant – Samir Shah.
Largely unreported is the fact that Shah told a December 2023 Commons Select Committee prior to his appointment – that in September 2023, former GB News chair and then Spectator editor, Andrew Neil, contacted Shah to alert him to the BBC chair vacancy and explicitly encouraged him to apply. He was appointed BBC chair in March 2024.
Shah, despite being a secular Muslim, has a history of producing controversial anti-Muslim content for television, including the provocative 2016 Channel 4 documentary What British Muslims Really Think, presented by Shah’s friend Trevor ‘Muslims are not like us’ Phillips and broadcast just two months before the Brexit vote. It became one of the most complained-about programmes in Channel 4’s history. The title implied a hidden, monolithic “truth” about British Muslims – suggesting they were deceptive or unintegrated – and portrayed them as a problem needing to be “civilised” into Britishness.
Shah also co-authored the Tory government’s whitewashed Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report; as chair of the Museum of the Home, he retained a statue linked to slavery despite protests; and he is the vice chair of the controversial History Matters project at the influential right-wing think tank Policy Exchange.
Launched in 2020 amid the Black Lives Matter protests, it purports to safeguard Britain’s historical heritage from ‘woke’ revisions. In reality, it functions as another astroturf-linked group and thinly veiled conservative backlash vehicle that cherry-picks incidents to stoke culture wars while conveniently overlooking or downplaying the British empire’s own brutal legacies of slavery and colonialism.
Capturing the upper ranks
The previous BBC chair, Richard Sharp, resigned after failing to disclose his role in facilitating an £800,000 loan guarantee for then-PM Johnson. He’d previously donated more than £400,000 to the Conservative Party, worked with Rishi Sunak at Goldman Sachs, served as a director of Tufton Street’s Centre for Policy Studies, and his family trust funded several right-wing lobby groups – including another Tufton Street think tank, the TaxPayers’ Alliance.
Recently resigned director-general Tim Davie was a former Tory councillor who repeatedly misled MPs about the political balance of Question Time panellists. At a Commons Select Committee about the BBC in September, he claimed that in 2025, the non-politician guests were “equally divided” between Left, Right, and neutral voices. The real breakdown told a different story: Left: 21 (36%) | Right: 29 (50%) | Neutral: 8 (14%) – despite a Labour government holding a large majority.
Then there’s Robbie Gibb, whose BBC board role remains deeply controversial. A former Downing Street communications chief under Theresa May, he has extensive Conservative Party ties, and was accused in 2021 of editorial interference over the appointment of Jess Brammar.
In April 2020, Gibb led a consortium that acquired the The Jewish Chronicle from insolvency for around £3.5mn. The group included figures like William Shawcross, John Woodcock (now Lord Austin), and John Ware. Gibb served as the sole director of Jewish Chronicle Media Ltd and declared a “100 per cent holding” in his BBC interests filing, acting as the public face but in August 2024, stepped down as director, transferring operational control to consortium members Jonathan Kandel and Lord Austin.
The Jewish Chronicle issued a formal apology following a scandal during Gibb’s tenure involving fabricated or misrepresented claims in sensational articles about the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza in a statement published on its website on Friday, 13 September, 2024, following an internal investigation that concluded the previous day. This came after the removal of nine articles on that date, amid escalating public scrutiny.
From late 2019/early 2020 to October 2020, Gibb also worked as editorial advisor for GB News, co-owned by hedge fund multimillionaire Paul Marshall, prior to its launch in 2021. Earlier this year, Marshall called for the BBC to be dismantled.
Appointed to the BBC board in May 2021 during Johnson’s premiership, Gibb has used his position to amplify recent attacks on the corporation from within. His formative immersion in the anti-communist émigré network the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS) during the early 1980s – where he learned the mechanics of underground propaganda and saw information as a weapon in ideological warfare – has, commentators observe, shaped a career-long focus on strategic messaging and influence over information, spanning his student courier work, his time as Downing Street communications chief, and now his role on the BBC board.
The BBC – flawed cornerstone of democracy
Each of these appointments and interventions forms part of a larger pattern – the slow repurposing of public broadcasting into a partisan echo chamber.
One of the great advantages of Britain’s system of public service broadcasting (PSB) is that it became the place for the national conversation. In these dangerously polarised times, in which echoes of 1930s Europe are once again clear and obvious, we are extremely fortunate to have a system in which our democracy can still speak to itself.
The BBC has long been the place where the British people turn for a collective experience at moments of crisis and celebration. It remains one of – if not the – greatest broadcasters on earth. And just like our NHS, right-wing populists hate it precisely because it acts as a reminder that not everything is best delivered by the invisible hand, and plays a key role in protecting democracy and citizens from oligarchy and neoliberal tyranny.
Yes, our BBC is highly imperfect. Yes, it sometimes fails its own standards. But that’s precisely the point – it has standards, unlike the billionaire-funded alternatives. Every sensible person wants news that is as close to being balanced, impartial, and accurate as humanly possible – and every sensible person knows that none of its competitors come anywhere near the BBC in striving for those ideals.
Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, Kemi Badenoch’s Tories, Donald Trump’s Republicans, and some within Keir Starmer’s Labour would all prefer it didn’t exist.
You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone. I want a future for my daughter in which both the BBC and democracy continue to play a prominent role.
A last stand for public service broadcasting
Two years ago, I ended my viral open letter to the BBC with a simple truth:
“Britain needs the BBC. Along with the NHS, it is one of the few genuinely unifying public institutions we have left.”
That truth has not changed – but the threat has grown. The BBC does need reform: greater accountability to the public who fund it, and stronger protection from political interference. Yet its founding mission “to act in the public interest… to inform, educate and entertain” remains as vital as ever.
Help to defend and improve it now – or lose the right to complain when it’s gone.
Yours faithfully,
Dr Russell Jackson
