Huw Edwards’ downfall and a clash of competing rights

Huw knew? In the end, just about everyone. If the Great Depression was presaged by shoeshine boys giving stock tips, the identity of the BBC presenter allegedly engaged in cash for photos exchanges with nameless youths was surely heralded by cab drivers boasting WhatsApp snaps ostensibly of the man himself.

The gaff was blown. The gig was up. Huw Edwards had been caught with his trousers down. Eyebrow raised, lip a-curl and, for once, neither belonged to the Welsh harbinger of news and moments of great national import.

I speak, of course, of the strange case of the bare-bottomed presenter. A mystery which, since last Friday had kept, the nation guessing. Or rather chuckling knowingly. By Weds, with the cat well and truly out of the bag, Edwards’ wife put both the BBC and the baying hounds of the press pack out of their misery and named names.   

For days, the BBC has declined to name the man at the centre of allegations first brought by The Sun and acting on information supplied by the youth’s mother. Allegations later denied by the complainant’s own lawyer.  

We remain no closer to answers as to what’s gone on though other young people have now supplemented the accusations, as have BBC staff. The police, meanwhile, maintain that nothing criminal has occurred.

Naturally, this has the media in its many tribal manifestations in a rage and it’s riding through town in a crackle of aimless small arms fire, ricochets zinging off everyone’s reputation.  

Let’s see if we can zero the sights a bit. 

First, there in the cross hairs, is the BBC itself. An organisation in a permanent state of crisis and whose effigy pops up every time the wider media world feels like going to the range for target practice. It hardly helps itself in ways too many to enumerate. And for all its experience of crisis remains cumbersome, lacking in urgency and often high-handed in response.

This is the more odd because it is an organisation filled with journalists. In my own time there, now many years ago, correspondents and presenters continued to be baffled by the interest in them and more baffled yet by the insistence on the part of other news outlets to ask questions about them. Often aggressively. 

I once received a timorous late-night phone call from an experienced correspondent asking what to do about the door-stepping Fleet Street posse waiting by his gate.

Years later, Andrew Marr, fresh from grilling a politician, sheepishly confessed to having applied for a super-injunction to protect his privacy after having an affair while he was the BBC’s political editor.  

It is this odd combination of naïveté, hypocrisy and sense of siege which often runs through the broadcaster’s inability to act decisively when these things come up. 

The Beeb is also well aware that on-screen talent attracts obsessives, stalkers and the simply strange to a quite frightening degree and of which the unsolved murder of Jill Dando remains the most tragic manifestation. Green ink fantasies are commonplace and it’s possible they at first believed this to be another. (Though whispers suggest Edwards’ behaviour had attracted questions in the past.)

In this, BBC newscasters are not unique. The same level of obsession has extended even to the sort of media outlets who hacked the phones of prominent people including news presenters there and elsewhere during spells of personal trauma. 

This, and what in its own occasionally perverse terms it sees as the decency of loyalty, means it clenches round its ‘talent’ as a reflex. Auntie protects as much as it flinches from its own demanding, occasionally abusive, charges.

The hell this road paved with good intentions leads to is the likes of Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris. Conversely its rather over-zealous defamation of both Lord McAlpine and Sir Cliff Richard do not compare well and lead to questions over its motives. 

The Cliff Richard case is particularly pertinent given that it pivoted on breaching the privacy of the Peter Pan of pop by naming him as a suspect in a sexual offences investigation.

And into this swirl one must add the small matter of natural justice. How quick and diligent the BBC was in investigating the allegations in May remains to be seen. But, for the moment, the truth behind what is being suggested was and remains uncertain. 

Calls from within the organisation to out the man in the middle were therefore self-interested. Naturally, there were some high-profile claims that the sullying of the BBC sullied them by association but, more nakedly, as with the case of Jeremy Vine, it was more to exculpate themselves and remove them from online speculation. 

To a degree, fair enough. But all of them would not hesitate to take shelter under Auntie’s skirts should they face a similar situation. Surely, they might want their employer to at least establish whether there are facts to throw in the way of a good story. 

To that notion, Tim Davie might have felt bound. Particularly by the uncertain restraints of privacy laws. To be wrong, to have committed a name to scrutiny in those circumstances, might have proved a very costly mistake both for Edwards and for the BBC itself. Not least as guilt or being under investigation does not necessarily exclude a right to privacy as a recent Bloomberg case demonstrated.

That one name was now consistently in the public domain was neither here nor there. From the point of view of Davie, he hadn’t put it there. 

All of which brings us neatly to the rest of the media, hurling the disparate weight of its comment pieces pointlessly at the BBC’s silence and getting ever angrier in the face of dumb insolence.

Notwithstanding their near universal loathing of the Beeb, their motives are mixed. There is a reasonable point in claiming public interest – as opposed to what interests the public – in that Edwards is plainly a known figure working for an organisation funded by a mandatory public levy.

No media organisation is free of bad behaviour. None incapable of dealing with it with a discretion it permits few others. But few are paid for by the public and few enjoy the nightly visit-to-your-living-room profile as BBC presenters nor do many come armed with the same moral tone. 

Whether that trumps the right to privacy in law remains untested. Neither The Sun nor any other newspaper felt sufficiently emboldened to risk rising to the challenge and perhaps impotent rage is at play. It would have been so much easier if Davie gave the order for his press office to cross that Rubicon for them.

For all the anger, the DG was in an impossible position. To publish was to be damned. Not to publish equally so.  He will also be fully aware that truth will out – it always does – and that his own organisation’s rigour and judgement will come under microscopic scrutiny when it does.

For Edwards, currently in hospital and the in the grip of a depressive breakdown, there is something of the Greek tragedy in what must now surely be his downfall. Hubris to nemesis. If what little is known has substance, it is also an instant 1,000 words to the first Freudian columnist who can explain such wilfully self-destructive behaviour. There are no accidents. 

On a purely human level, it’s hard not to feel for a man ruined though it is equally hard to imagine the BBC sparing a politician, businessman or showbiz personality caught in the same predicament. The inevitable Little Britain press conference of Sir Norman Fry would surely ensue followed by stern disapproval back in the studio.

There is here, as in so many areas of modern life, a clash of competing rights. Most of us might look blushingly at our shoes should our own peccadilloes and tastes be dragged out for public consumption. But then, I suppose, most of us don’t announce the death of the Queen to grief-stricken millions nor commentate on the crowning of the monarch either.

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