‘There is a brown fog; nobody is building; it is drizzling,” Virginia Woolf recorded in her diary for 6 May 1926. “The first thing in the morning we stand at the window & watch the traffic in Southampton Row. This is incessant. Everyone is bicycling; motor cars are huddled up with extra people … It is all tedious & depressing, rather like waiting in a train outside a station. Rumours are passed round – that the gas would be cut off at 1 – false of course. One does not know what to do … A voice, rather commonplace & official, yet the only common voice left, wishes us good morning at 10. This is the voice of Britain, to which we can make no reply. The voice is very trivial, & only tells us that the Prince of Wales is coming back, that the London streets present an unprecedented spectacle.”

Woolf was writing on the third day of the General Strike, observing events from Bloomsbury. There were no newspapers but the hastily put-together government propaganda sheet, the British Gazette, edited from 11 Downing Street, and the TUC’s the British Worker. Her husband, Leonard, was running around organising a petition in support of the strikers; Woolf was also worrying about frocks amid the mayhem; their well-connected friends were popping in and out, trading rumour and opinion.

The atmosphere nationally was fraught. The fomenters of the strike had been demonised by the establishment as Bolsheviks and revolutionaries. The previous autumn, rumours of fantastical plots (the guards at Buckingham Palace to be chloroformed, a soviet to be set up in the Palace of Westminster) had not been discouraged by MI5 and Special Branch. There was what we would now call a climate of fear. Woolf’s dentist, whom she visited on 7 May, told her: “It is red rag versus union jack, Mrs Woolf.”

Trade unionists march during the general strike in 1926 Photograph: /Photograph:/Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis Photograph: Photograph: /Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis

In May 1926 the BBC was still locked into agreements with newspaper proprietors that there should be no news broadcast before 6pm, so as not to scoop the morning papers. Its bulletins were provided by wire services; the young company had no newsgathering operation of its own. But during the strike, with the BBC left as the main form of mass communication, it assumed a new importance during the strike. Immense pressure was placed on John Reith, the BBC’s managing director, to make BBC news “a kind of offshoot to [the British Gazette] … I was not going to have that at all,” he remembered in his diary. The following day, 5 May, he recorded: “Churchill wants to commandeer the BBC.”

The next morning, while Woolf was staring out of the window in Bloomsbury, he was rowing again in Whitehall. “Winston … said it was monstrous not to use such an instrument [as broadcasting] to the best possible advantage.”

Daily bulletins



For the first time in its brief history, the BBC carried bulletins throughout the day. According to Woolf’s account they were not especially earth-shattering. On 7 May she described the morning broadcast: “‘London calling the British Isles. Good morning everyone.’ That is how it begins at 10. The only news is that the archbishops are conferring, & ask our prayers that they may be guided right. Whether this means action, we know not. We know nothing.”

The prime minister, the reassuring, tweed-clad figure of Stanley Baldwin, adopted a subtler position than Churchill, his chancellor. A cabinet meeting on 11 May, according to Reith’s diary, took the view that the government should be able to say “that they did not commandeer [the BBC], but they know that they can trust us not to be really impartial”. In other words, it was seen that there were advantages in retaining at least the appearance of an independent BBC.

By this time, Baldwin had broadcast to the nation, from Reith’s house, and heavily coached – Reith persuaded him to include the words: “I am a man of peace. I am longing and working and praying for peace, but I will not surrender the safety and the security of the British constitution.”

When Ramsay MacDonald asked to put an alternative point of view, as leader of the opposition, Reith referred the request to Baldwin, “strongly recommending that they should allow it to be done”. The message came back that the government was “quite against MacDonald broadcasting” – leaving Reith in, as he saw it, “a very awkward and unfair position”. MacDonald did not broadcast.

Reith had successfully fended off a takeover, and, in insisting on broadcasting statements from the TUC, had prevented the BBC becoming a mere propaganda tool. He had held on to the BBC’s independence, just – but he had tactically sacrificed impartiality.

Later, Reith spoke of his stand on the General Strike as a triumph. Others were less certain. Hilda Matheson, the first director of talks at the BBC, put it this way: “The government did not commandeer the BBC … It is no secret that it was owing to BBC insistence that the bulletins of the Trades Union Council, as well as the communiques of the government, were both broadcast. It is not suggested that the weight of the BBC was not thrown preponderatingly on the side of authority; the important point, for the social historian, is that a degree of independence and impartiality could be preserved at all.”

Her colleague, the first editor of the Listener, Rex Lambert, was rather more blunt. “I have heard Sir John Reith many times express his pride in the part played by the BBC in supplying the public with ‘unbiased’ news during the strike. But Labour circles received these boasts with scepticism; the only point of general agreement being that the cessation of newspapers during the strike had given broadcasting its first big opportunity of showing what it could do to influence a steady public opinion in a crisis.” The BBC, under pressure, had thrown its lot in with the establishment.

Reith, in his early articulation of the role of the BBC in his book Broadcast Over Britain (1924), had laid out the importance, and the difficulties, of impartiality, for the young broadcaster. “So far, controversial matters have rarely been handled by us, and if dealt with at all, usually in an innocuous manner. It has been considered wise policy up to the present to refrain from controversies as a general principle … the tendency is, however, in the direction of giving greater freedom in this respect … It will not be easy to persuade the public of an absolute impartiality, but impartiality is essential.”

‘We should stand for good, honest journalism’

Nearly 90 years on, the same principles lie at the heart of BBC News. The director general, Tony Hall, who was director of BBC News in the 1990s, put it like this: “I think the reason that the vast majority of people in this country support the BBC is because we are independent, we are impartial. That means we should be brave, we should stand for good, honest journalism, brave journalism.” But the question for BBC News is now, as it always has been, how far those great principles – independence and impartiality – can withstand the pressures brought to bear upon them.

BBC news and current affairs as it is today would be unimaginable to Reith, Matheson or Lambert. It is an empire within an empire. It employs 8,000 of the corporation’s 21,000 workforce, 5,500 of whom are journalists. Via the World Service it has a tentacular reach to 191 million people across the globe, and its presence on the domestic scene is overwhelming, with its TV and radio bulletins both national and local, its website and heavyweight current affairs shows such as Newsnight and Panorama. Some 80% of Britons receive their news from the BBC, and it is more trusted than any other news provider.

John Sweeney’s BBC Panorama documentary North Korea Uncovered. Photograph: BBC Photograph: BBC

In this context of dominance, the relative attention the BBC gives to a story, or a point of view, matters enormously. By casting its powerful beam of attention on to a matter, it causes that story to become important, an issue of national moment; and other news organisations follow its lead. If it turns its gaze away, the issue can etiolate and fade from the public consciousness. How much time to devote to reflecting public anxiety about immigration? How much time to accommodate the views of those who deny climate change? In politics, this question of weighting is especially fraught and contested. If the BBC slips to the left or the right, it can take the whole nation with it. Politicians themselves care about BBC news and current affairs in a deeply personal way: it is a reflex of politicians (and indeed of newspaper executives) to calibrate their notion of the day’s mood by the choice of items on the Today programme. In the hermetic world of the British establishment, a news programme’s power may be judged not by how many are in its audience but by who they are.

Free from commercial interests, lacking the baser instincts of newspapers or independent broadcasters who must satisfy the whims of proprietors and shift copies or sell advertising space; lacking, even, the kind of principle that animates the Guardian, which was founded explicitly as a progressive, justice-seeking voice after the Peterloo massacre, BBC News, theoretically at least, just is: ineffable, truth-telling.

‘Hold the ring in the middle of a national debate’

Mark Damazer, now master of St Peter’s College, Oxford, once deputy director of BBC News, told me he believed one of the BBC’s functions was to “hold the ring in the middle of a national debate”. Without the BBC performing that function, in the centre of news and current affairs, giving it an existence beyond the world of ulterior motives, debate would become “atomised”. He said: “I have an absolutely fundamental view that Britain would not be the better for it, we’d be the worse for it.”

Just as the nation’s sense of itself can shift according to the BBC’s news agenda, so the corporation can shake because of decisions taken in its news and current affairs division. The immense power the BBC wields in reporting and reflecting the matters of the day is counterpointed by immense vulnerability. The BBC knows that although it is free from the vagaries of funding by direct taxation, its charter and the licence fee are set by the government of the day. Thus it is that the government and the BBC will always dance a curious dance – a delicate waltz that might slide into a sparring match, a grapple or, occasionally, a death grip.

A mural on the side of a house in Bogside, Londonderry, Northern Ireland Photograph: Peter Turnley/Corbis Photograph: Peter Turnley/Corbis

The corporation’s moments of greatest existential struggle with governments have tended to flow from arguments about news and current affairs: first, the General Strike. Later, the Suez crisis, the Falklands, Northern Ireland, the Iraq war. It is no coincidence that every director general since the early 1980s (except for the accountant Mike Checkland in the late 1980s and the outsider Greg Dyke in the early 2000s) has passed through BBC news and current affairs, for it is the corporation’s intellectual powerbase and producer of its most ambitious officer class. Hall was director of news; George Entwistle edited Newsnight; Mark Thompson edited the Nine O’Clock News and Panorama; John Birt was deputy director general in charge of news and current affairs; Alasdair Milne was in at the birth of television current affairs.

The last of these moments of great vulnerability came a decade ago, as Britain went to war with Iraq. But the seeds of the story of the BBC’s falling out with New Labour go back to the party’s years in the wilderness, and resentment at what was regarded as the unfair treatment of its former leader Neil Kinnock in the press. Under Tony Blair, and with Peter Mandelson – himself a former current affairs producer for LWT – a rising power, New Labour was determined things would be different. Control of the narrative would not be allowed to drift away, Damazer remembered. “There was a tremendous activist sense that they needed to be ‘on it’ the whole time, with every weapon at their disposal – rhetorical, technological, persuasion, off-the-record chat – and they were probably as intense a set of media managers as we’ve had before or since.”

BBC in conflict with New Labour



According to Richard Sambrook, who was the BBC’s director of news from 2001, trouble between the BBC and New Labour brewed when Britain intervened in Kosovo in 1999: Alastair Campbell, then Blair’s press secretary, accused the media of being too much in thrall to Slobodan Milosevic’s “lie machine”. After 9/11, the stakes became much, much higher.

Sambrook recalled: “There would be constant faxes complaining about bits of coverage. It came to a head after [reporter] Rageh Omaar had done a piece from Kabul about a hospital, or some casualties or something. Alastair rang me about 10.30pm, absolutely screaming down the phone, saying words to the effect of: ‘If you don’t get this crap off the airways we’re going to throw everything we’ve got at you.’ About two days later Kabul fell so all that went away but by that time, within Downing Street, the notion was the BBC was not on side; that they’re a problem.”

Damazer – who has the calming, judicious air of a diplomat – often had the job of responding to complaints: in a tone of relentless, public-service politeness, such that “politeness became an aesthetic”. He added: “I think what Campbell would say – there may be some truth in this – is that low-level attempts periodically to resolve difficulties with the BBC always met a maximalist response, even though I would say it was polite. The BBC is institutionally not merely not rude but almost painfully, almost aggressively polite … he may well have simply got irritated by hitting his hand into the blancmange and it just being a blancmange.”

Damazer said that he, personally, became anaesthetised to it all: the New Labour commentary on impartiality was so obviously self-interested “that you could only see it as at least in part an attempt at persuasion or coercion”.

The crux came at 6.07am on 29 May 2003, when Andrew Gilligan reported on the Today programme that, according to a source, the joint intelligence committee report on Saddam Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons capability had been “sexed up” by the government with a claim that such weapons could be activated within 45 minutes of an order. That there had been any deception was fiercely denied by the government and it was amid the ensuing maelstrom that the story’s source, Dr David Kelly, took his own life. Lord Hutton’s controversial and contested report into the death of the Ministry of Defence weapons expert was deeply critical of the BBC and precipitated the resignation of both the director general, Dyke, and the chairman, Gavyn Davies. That simultaneous toppling of the twin titans of the BBC was an unprecedentedly traumatic event in the history of the corporation. It was made all the more bitter by the fact that the struggle was fratricidal: Dyke’s appointment as DG had been controversial because he had been a donor to New Labour.

Jeremy Paxman, left, interviewing Prime Minister Tony Blair for BBC2’s Newsnight special on the crisis in Iraq in 2003. Photograph: /Jeff Overs/PA Photograph: Jeff Overs/PA

Looking back, it is Sambrook’s opinion – one that would be strongly contested by some of his former colleagues, and by the dramatis personae of the former Labour government – that “what Kelly told Gilligan was right, was the right story. Unfortunately, Gilligan was sloppy in the way he reported it, the Today programme was sloppy in the way they handled Gilligan and by the time the row was happening the BBC was at full defensive mode with its old tactic of, ‘Let’s put up a wall of defence and shelter behind it.’ But the mood within Downing Street was not going to put up with that.”

Sambrook continued: “I suppose in a sense what I’m saying is that Kelly was a kind of mini-Edward Snowden story. He was saying that actually this intelligence has been completely misused, and many people inside the tent knew it and were uncomfortable about it.

“I think the BBC could have done it in a different way and in hindsight I regret that we didn’t manage it properly. But if the BBC says to the government that fundamentally there is rot at the core here, that’s a big problem. And the BBC has to be very, very careful, because it is in the end dependent on a political deal to exist.”

Sambrook and I were talking over indifferent coffee in the faintly shabby bar at the top of the high-rise St George’s hotel in London, next door to Broadcasting House. Sambrook gazed distractedly out of the window, down on to the city far below. “After Hutton, I’d say it was about two years till I got over it. It was the first thing I thought about when I woke up in the morning and the last thing I thought about when I went to bed at night, every single day. What happened there? What could I have done differently? To what extent was I culpable, or not culpable?”

Sambrook left the BBC in 2010. He has since become a professor of journalism at the University of Cardiff and applied his mind to the academic study of the mechanics and ethics of news. He began to speak about the US intelligence officer, Snowden, who leaked documents in June 2013 to the Guardian and Washington Post that started a worldwide debate on the balance between surveillance and privacy. “If Edward Snowden had contacted Panorama or Newsnight could they have done what the Guardian did? No. No, they couldn’t,” he said.

“They might have been able to do a piece at a meta level, a headline level, but they could not have done what the Guardian did with Snowden. I find it uncomfortable to say that, but it’s the truth. So what does that tell you about the BBC? It tells you that in the end there is a limit to its independence – some would call that public accountability. It is a wonderful news organisation. It does fantastic journalism every day. But there is a limit to it. And I think in the end that was part of a miscalculation in the Kelly story. We thought we were genuinely independent. And we weren’t.”

Post-Hutton era



Where does BBC journalism stand now, in the post-Hutton era? The current head of news, former Times editor James Harding, who joined the BBC in August 2013, takes the opposite view from Sambrook. “The BBC has over the years shown it is entirely independent. There are always debates about coverage. But the independence of the BBC and the BBC journalists I think is central to the public’s trust in the BBC. That’s the reason why it has the support it does,” he told me.

Nick Robinson, now the BBC’s political editor, who was at ITV at the time of the Hutton inquiry, is optimistic. Hutton “didn’t have the chilling effect it might have done,” he told me, since it became clear fairly quickly how one-sided the report was. He has never bought the idea, he said, that the BBC is “being cowed”. Robert Peston, the BBC’s economics editor, agreed: “I have not felt haunted by Hutton,” he said. When he broke the story of the failure of Northern Rock – withstanding complaints from senior politicians, the Financial Services Authority and others “who were claiming I was somehow out to destroy the British economy and I should be shut down” – he felt completely supported by the BBC.

Far more crushing, Robinson said, to the temper and spirit of BBC News has been the aftermath of the troubles at Newsnight – the Jimmy Savile and Lord McAlpine affairs – which culminated in the resignation, in November 2012, of the then director general, George Entwistle. “It produced an atmosphere of flatness at best and despair at worst. If organisations can be depressed, it was depressed. Our organisation stood accused first of suppressing a major story then of carelessly libelling a public figure.” The arrival of Hall and Harding has, he said, “freed people from the introversion – until the next crisis rolls along, of course”.

‘I think the issue with investigative journalism is that it takes a lot of time, real resources, and a lot of discipline in pursuing the story. Photograph: /Cambridge Jones/Getty Images Photograph: Cambridge Jones/Getty Images

Jeremy Bowen, the BBC Middle East editor, fondly remembers Harding as a young reporter on the Financial Times who stayed on the couch in his room in the El Rancho hotel during “a long stakeout” in Port-au-Prince in 1994. He has done his time in the trenches, so to speak. Harding told me he is committed to investigative journalism. “I think the issue with investigative journalism is that it takes a lot of time, real resources, and a lot of discipline in pursuing the story, addressing every angle, thinking it through. And we live in a world where there are quite a lot of litigious people. You’ve got to be able to take those pressures on.” Investigative journalism was, he said, “one of the central roles in everything we do in current affairs. And should be true across all of our news output”.

But how far is the BBC willing to take its journalism up against the establishment – and the government, which in the end seals the BBC’s fate? Other journalists I spoke to within the BBC were much less sanguine. “The BBC is at its highest levels concerned with not offending the establishment, not making enemies in important places. Its core purpose – independent and impartial journalism – clashes with its survival instincts, and that goes back to the beginning,” said one senior journalist.

‘Senior people at the BBC see themselves part of the establishment’

Another took an even bleaker view. “Newsgathering – covering the stuff that is happening in the world – we do that brilliantly. The BBC newsgathering operation is genuinely a wonder to perceive. But digging out original stories? No, sorry. Nor has it ever done. When push comes to shove, senior people at the BBC consider themselves part of the establishment.”

The journalist saw the problems at Newsnight – the failure to pursue an investigation into Savile, the mistaken identification of Lord McAlpine on social media as a paedophile – as symptomatic of a bloated, anxious management, their timidity exacerbated by the fact that few had themselves worked as field producers or reporters.

The employee called such managers, as well the departments in charge of editorial policy and compliance, “journalism deterrent squads” who were strangling the efforts of colleagues “like Japanese knotweed”. Journalists are afraid of not being backed up by the BBC, added the employee, when the pressure is on – and compared the corporation’s approach with the much more bullish, confident and “cheeky, risk-taking” stance of Channel 4 News. “The BBC always buckles, always folds. You feel that as a journalist, they will abandon you; if you take a risky story to them it’s as if you are actively trying to get them into trouble. There is an institutionalised anxiety and mistrust.”

Peston said: “There is a risk-averse culture that means when the BBC wants people who can break stories it has to look to recruit from outside. When the BBC is training young journalists, it starts by telling them about the regulatory restraints: it starts with the rules and says: ‘Don’t you dare break them’.”

Bowen paid tribute to an organisation “in which there’s a great deal of creativity, where programme-makers really believe in what they’re doing, and in which people, despite everything, are proud to work.” But he too believes the BBC “is overly bureaucratic”. At times, he said, he has felt the BBC has “lost sight of our core business, which is broadcasting. It’s the British Broadcasting Corporation. It’s not the British Management Corporation.” He added: “I think things are changing, but we have also been too worried about what other people think, particularly the Daily Mail. There are times we could have, instead of apologising, stood up for ourselves a bit more strongly.”

Daily Mail headline in 1988. Photograph: /Alicia Canter/Observer Photograph: Alicia Canter/ Observer

A combination of anxiety and bureaucracy has led to some absurdities. As a senior correspondent of 30 years’ standing, he was last year required to undertake an online multiple-choice training course, “which had a scenario in which I was doing the morning shift on a local radio station in the Manchester area, and reports were coming in from the police of two Manchester United players involved in an incident in a nightclub”. He shook his head in disbelief. “I could have been trying to find out what’s going on in Syria while I was doing that. That’s absolutely insane, that kind of stuff.”

I asked another senior journalist whether the BBC had moved to the right, as some would argue. There was laughter. “Undoubtedly. You’re not supposed to read the Guardian at the BBC, because it confirms everyone’s prejudices. For years it has been more important at the BBC to be seen reading the Telegraph or the Times.”

Peston agreed. The BBC is often characterised as having an institutional bias to the left, but, he said: “What actually sends BBC news editors into a tizz is a splash in the Telegraph or the Mail, rather than one in the Guardian. Over time the criticism of the Mail and the Telegraph that we are too leftwing has got to us. So BBC editors feel under more pressure to follow up stories in the Telegraph and Mail than those in the Guardian.

‘There is no institutionalised bias to the left’

“For example, for a long time I was saying that the phone hacking scandal [pursued by Nick Davies of the Guardian] was a huge story. Basically, I was talking to people who didn’t want to hear. It took us a long time to get stuck in. The fact is that we don’t get criticised for not following up the Guardian, but we do get criticised if we don’t follow up the Mail or Telegraph. There is no institutionalised bias to the left – if anything, it is a bit the other way.”

I also wondered whether there was what Birt might have once called a bias against understanding in BBC news and current affairs: I was thinking of the almost invariably aggressive tone of its news interviewing. Being tough on politicians was one thing; assuming that all-comers were, to paraphrase Jeremy Paxman “lying bastards lying to me” was, surely, limiting rather than aerating debate. Hall, when I discussed this notion with him, rejected it.

“We give the British public more of a platform to understand what’s important in the world than any other broadcaster and it’s one of our prime purposes. And you do that in all sorts of different ways and different styles,” he said. But he acknowledged the aftermath of his predecessor’s reign. “After the last two to three years the organisation’s taken a real battering and I think it did at times lose its sense of confidence,” he said. “I want to ensure that the BBC has got confidence to do great journalism, bold journalism and journalism that people admire.”

What is clear is that no other news organisation exists under the pressure BBC News withstands. An honestly made mistake at a newspaper such as the Financial Times or Telegraph, or even at a broadcaster such as Sky or ITV, might lead to embarrassment.

At the BBC, a mistake – at the public’s expense – can to lead to humiliation in the national press, to employees being doorstepped by newspapers, to questions in parliament, to multimillion-pound semi-judicial inquiries. The whole edifice can shake; the wellbeing of the entire organisation can founder; its future funding can be imperilled.

Under such circumstances, it is no wonder that the BBC can appear like a damaged, bullied child, defensive and afraid. The stakes for BBC News are immeasurably high. If we believe in the BBC as a positive and beneficial ideological intervention in our lives, if we believe in it as the greatest, and best loved, signifier of Britain there is, then things have to change – outside the BBC as well as inside it. The bullies need to lay off. The whole culture that surrounds it needs to become less vituperative, more mature.

And, as one of the journalists I spoke to said: “The fact is, you are more likely to be bullied if bullies think they can bully you.”