---
title: The BBC Has Been Lying to You for 100 Years
description: "Back in 2002, the British Broadcasting Corporation conducted a major television survey to determine The Greatest Briton in History. Well over a million viewers voted in the poll, with the crown for The Greatest Ever Briton eventually going to Winston Churchill – the man who led the nation to victory during the Second World War and who was also apparently quite a good amateur bricklayer.\n\nChurchill fought off some stiff and occasionally quite strange competition in the poll, including from the likes of Guy Fawkes, former Sex Pistol John Lydon, the distinctly non-British Bob Geldof, and the entirely fictional King Arthur.\n\nThe majority of names on the shortlist of 100 were long dead, including of course the winner. But had Churchill been alive to attend some kind of official ceremony and accept a prestigious prize from the BBC – perhaps a 'Blankety Blank' chequebook and pen – it might have been a fairly muted affair on both sides. You see, Churchill and the BBC didn't really have too much time for each other. In fact, shortly before he became prime minister, Churchill claimed that he had been muzzled by the BBC for years. Some might even say that the supposed Greatest Briton in History was effectively snubbed by the BBC for well over a decade, and his requests to participate in broadcasts were routinely turned down. Winston Churchill had been embroiled in a long-running feud with the BBC since around 1926, and it could be argued that he ultimately had the last laugh against the corporation, but he had a long wait until 1958 for that satisfying moment.\n\nThis was hardly a one-off situation, though. The poor old BBC has been fending off hostile attacks from some of the most influential figures in history ever since the company's inception in 1922. Fast-forward to 1990, and the former Chairman of the Conservative government, Norman Tebbit, is describing the BBC as the home of \"The insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of third-rate minds.\" Fast-forward even further to 2025 and we've reached a frankly bizarre situation in which the President of the United States of America is suing the BBC for defamation, whilst his press secretary Karoline Leavitt is publicly observing that British taxpayers are being \"Forced to foot the bill for a leftist propaganda machine.\"\n\nOver the course of the last century, the supposedly impartial and trustworthy BBC has frequently been accused of political bias, deliberately misleading viewers, and resorting to devious practices which, in one significant case, is alleged to have contributed to the death of a member of the Royal family. Even the long-running children's show 'Blue Peter' has been lying to our children since about 1962.\n\nPerhaps the deception and dishonesty can be traced right back to the very foundations on which the BBC was built. The company was barely four years old when the original General Manager, John Reith – a man who apparently admired Hitler – privately admitted in his diary that the government could trust the BBC to not really be impartial at all. Whilst the corporation appears to be constantly having to defend itself these days from the latest controversy or scandal, it appears that this was always the case right from the very beginning and that nothing much has changed.\n\nBut just how much can we truly trust the BBC? Is it more than a little unfair to be so aggressively critical of a corporation which has served the public over the last century under very challenging conditions and whilst under such constant scrutiny and scorn? Or is it finally time to scrap that outdated TV licence fee, and banish the deceitful British Broadcasting Corporation to the archives once and for all?\n\n## The Queen's Nose\n\nThe BBC has certainly made a long list of high-profile enemies over the years, including Jeremy Clarkson, Gregg Wallace, Liz Truss, the Scottish National Party, and Sir Cliff Richard. But in terms of pissing off figures in positions of power and influence, we think we can go one better than even Sir Cliff Richard. You know you might have a bit of a battle on your hands when the most powerful man in the world has filed a $10 billion lawsuit against you.\n\nPerhaps not everyone was taking President Trump entirely seriously when he first threatened to sue the BBC. Even his most devoted followers must admit that he has a tendency to change his mind, not follow up on his threats, or completely contradict what he was saying a few days earlier. At the time of writing this script, Trump has just described the UK soldiers who fought alongside the U.S in Afghanistan as the \"greatest of warriors\", just a couple of days after suggesting that the UK forces held back from the frontline to drink cups of tea and leave all the dirty work to the U.S military. In a sense, he's kind of like that drunk bloke in the pub who randomly ricochets between telling you that you're his best mate and threatening to smash your face in.\n\nBut in this case, Trump was true to his word, filing a lawsuit in Miami, Florida against the BBC in December 2025 which seeks $5 billion each on two counts relating to an episode of 'Panorama' first broadcast by the BBC just a few days before the 2024 Presidential Election.\n\nThe episode entitled 'Trump: A Second Chance?' included three short clips from the lengthy speech made by Trump to his supporters in January 2021 shortly after it became clear that he'd just lost the previous election to Joe Biden – although of course the man who never admits defeat didn't quite see it that way. In the version we see presented in 'Panorama', Trump says: \"We're going to walk down to the Capitol…and I'll be there with you. And we fight! We fight like hell!\"\n\nThis could be interpreted as a direct call to his supporters to march on the Capitol and take matters into their own hands. It also sounds as if he'll be joining in the fight himself, although he doesn't make it clear if he'll be fighting on the frontline or hanging around at the back like a British soldier. The problem is that the documentary fails to make it clear that Trump didn't come out with all those words in the same breath. The last bit about fighting like hell came about fifty minutes after the first bit about walking down to the Capitol. In-between those remarks, Trump had suggested that the purpose of the nice little stroll to the Capitol was to \"cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women\" and to make \"peaceful and patriotic protests.\"\n\nA further complication is that after splicing together the comments, the documentary then cuts immediately to scenes of angry Trump supporters marching on the Capitol as if they have been directly inspired by Trump's violent call to action, when in fact some of this footage was filmed before Trump had even finished speaking.\n\nNow it can't be forgotten that an angry mob of supporters did indeed attack the Capitol during and after a speech made by Trump in which he falsely claimed that the election results had been rigged. But it didn't happen in the way depicted in the BBC's 'Panorama' programme. And whilst it would have been perfectly legitimate for the BBC to show a few edited highlights of such a long, rambling speech, this should have been made clear instead of giving the misleading impression that Trump had given a single and continuous instruction to walk down to the Capitol and fight like hell.\n\nIt took quite a while for people to get angry about it, though. When this edition of 'Panorama' was first broadcast in late 2024, nobody appeared too bothered about the dodgy edit. In fact, nobody seemed to care for the best part of a year. This wasn't even the first time that the BBC had played this kind of trick with the Trump speech. A 2022 edition of 'Newsnight' had also spliced together segments of the speech to give a similar misleading impression without alerting viewers to the edit. But again, nobody cared.\n\nThe first time that anyone really began to sit up and take notice was when an internal BBC memo conveying concerns over the 'Panorama' edit was leaked to the press in late 2025. The memo had been composed earlier in the year by the BBC Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee adviser Michael Prescott who pointed out that the misleading edits in the Panorama programme created a distortion of the day's events and were an example of systematic bias reflected by the BBC. It was this leaked memo which caused the heavily belated storm that eventually brought the matter to the attention of President Trump, although he did appear to be a bit confused over what exactly was the problem. At one point, he told reporters at the Oval Office that he felt obliged to sue the corporation because: \"Literally, they put words in my mouth. They had me saying things that I never said coming out. I guess they used AI or something.\"\n\nLiterally, that's not what happened at all, and it makes you wonder if he ever received a proper briefing. Alternatively, perhaps he never made that false claim at all, and we were all just watching footage spliced together by the BBC from separate sentences that were uttered seven years apart.\n\nTrump was now demanding an apology and substantial compensation from the BBC who were certainly very quick to apologise after acknowledging that they had made an error of judgement. And there were a couple of swift high-level casualties from the fallout. The director-general of the BBC, Tim Davie, resigned from his post, alongside the CEO of BBC News, Deborah Turness. But the corporation didn't believe that Trump had a basis for a defamation claim.\n\nTrump obviously disagreed and has filed a lawsuit which claims that the Panorama edit was a \"brazen attempt to interfere in and influence the 2024 Election's outcome to President Trump's detriment.\" The first $5 billion count alleges that the edit of the speech defamed Trump \"intentionally\" and \"with actual malice\" whilst the second $5 billion count alleges that the deceptive broadcast was a violation of trade practices law in Florida where it was argued that the episode of Panorama was available to watch.\n\nIt's just interesting to ponder that this whole controversy which took out two senior BBC executives in a single blow wasn't sparked by outrage from viewers or Trump supporters. The edit was ignored for a year and would have remained forgotten had it not been for that single internal memo written by Michael Prescott – a memo which now could potentially cost the BBC a cool $10 billion. Or could it?\n\nWell, hold that thought as we'll return to the topic of the most likely outcome in either five or fifty minutes, depending on how deceptively this video was edited. But this wasn't the only time that a dodgy edit involving a high-profile figure landed the BBC in hot water. One incident from 2007 led to the only time in the history of the corporation when the serving controller of BBC1 resigned from his position in disgrace. And yet it all might seem so surprisingly tame and faintly bewildering when we start saying it out loud.\n\nThe BBC had commissioned a company called RDF Media to produce a series entitled 'Monarchy: The Royal Family at Work.' The production team were granted exclusive access to the Royal family's inner circle for a whole year, following around Queen Elizabeth II as she prepares for state visits, oversees the impending celebrations for her 80th birthday, attends lavish dinner parties, and secretly confesses that she is a devil-worshipping Russian spy. No, hang on, that last bit isn't true, there was nothing quite as controversial as that to crop up in the series. In fact, there was nothing controversial at all about the series itself. The problem was with the 60-second trailer which was shown during an Autumn press launch for the BBC's upcoming new shows.\n\nThe trailer includes a segment in which the Queen is dressed up in full Royal clobber whilst taking part in a photoshoot. The American portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz makes a suggestion to the Queen that she might try removing the crown to make the whole scene look \"less dressy.\" The Queen seems to think that Annie Leibovitz might not fully grasp the levels of pomp and grandeur that these photoshoots are meant to embody. With a twinkle in her eye, she responds: \"Less dressy? What do you think this is?\" However, the twinkle appears to have disappeared a couple of seconds later when the Queen is then seen marching out of the photoshoot, grumpily telling one of her aides: \"I'm not changing anything! I've done enough dressing like this!\"\n\nThe BBC1 controller Peter Fincham was present at the launch and was clearly quite excited about this exclusive insight into the life of the Queen. Just before the trailer was shown, he told the reporters that they were about to see a sneak peek of \"a memorable moment\" in which the Queen \"loses it a bit\" and \"walks out in a huff.\"\n\nWhat Fincham didn't know is that this isn't really how things went down. And this wasn't just a case of skipping through a few boring bits, it was more a case of presenting the events in the wrong order. The Queen's huffy comments to her aide were made as she was walking into the photoshoot, before she playfully teased the photographer over the \"less dressy\" suggestion. So she didn't storm out of the photoshoot as implied by the trailer, it was more a case of storming *into* the photoshoot.\n\nThe BBC had not been made aware that the sequences in the trailer were out of order. RDF Media provided the material for the trailer, and later on they couldn't quite make up their minds about whether it was perfectly normal to show \"taster\" material out of sequence, or whether they had been just deliberately trying to spice things up a bit.\n\nFollowing the press launch, Peter Fincham was informed by RDF Media for the first time that there might just have been a right royal cock-up with the editing of the launch tape. He contacted Buckingham Palace officials to apologise, and they jointly agreed to hold off making any kind of public statement until the following day so that they could \"check the temperature of the story.\" We guess the hope here was that the story might not generate too much fuss, but the next day's newspapers had other ideas. The press was running rampant with reports that our miserable old Queen had flounced out of a photoshoot after refusing to take off her crown.\n\nThe BBC put the record straight with a public apology which explained that the material on the launch tape had been supplied to them in error. Peter Fincham took responsibility for the \"regrettable human error\" but initially insisted that he had no intention of resigning over the matter. It was a different story when the results of an internal BBC investigation were published just a few months later. Whilst the report found that nobody at the BBC had ever consciously set out to defame or misrepresent the Queen, it still concluded that \"The incident revealed misjudgements, poor practice and ineffective systems as well, of course, as the usual helping of bad luck that often accompanies such sorry cases.\" Peter Fincham became the only controller of BBC1 to step down in the wake of a scandal, and he wasn't the only casualty. The BBC's head of press Jane Fletcher also resigned, as did the chief creative officer of RDF Media.\n\nThe saga since dubbed 'Crowngate' may have taken down some notable figures, but some critics have pondered over whether this was all just a bit of an over-the-top reaction to a relatively trivial matter. We're hardly talking about inciting an insurrection here. We're talking about a woman who sounded a bit grumpy on her way into a photoshoot rather than on her way out. Whilst it could be argued that the BBC1 controller should have been a bit more aware of the content he was confidently hawking to the press, his shamed resignation feels like a bit of a harsh outcome. If the woman in question had been anyone other than the Queen, it feels likely that nobody would have batted an eyelid over a couple of sequences in a promotional trailer getting shown out of order.\n\nWe've no idea if the Queen herself was remotely bothered when she heard about the trailer, or if she stormed out of Buckingham Palace wielding an axe and heading in the general direction of Wood Lane. But it makes you wonder what would happen if the BBC ever did anything really bad to properly wind up members of the Royal family. Except, as we'll discover after our brief sojourn into children's programming, we already know the answer to that one…\n\n## The Secret Life of Dogs\n\nTwo incidents usually come to mind when discussing 'Blue Peter' – the world's longest running children's TV show which has been in regular production since 1958. The first is that time in 1969 when they paraded a cute baby elephant called Lulu around the studio and she proceeded to urinate and defecate all over the floor before dragging the handler off camera. The second is that time in 1998 when the presenter Richard Bacon was fired after it was revealed by the press that he had taken cocaine in a London nightclub. So that's about 67 years of broadcasting encapsulated by a presenter taking cocaine and a shitting baby elephant.\n\nThe cocaine incident didn't seem to do much harm to Richard Bacon's career in the long term. He's probably done a lot better than most Blue Peter presenters. But he did receive a firm public ticking off from the Head of Children's BBC, Lorraine Heggessey, when she addressed the young viewers in a short statement broadcast before the first episode of 'Blue Peter' to follow the sacking. She explained that Richard Bacon had been very naughty indeed and that he wouldn't be returning to the show after he'd admitted to taking an illegal drug. She pointed out that Bacon had not only let down himself and the whole team of Blue Peter, but he'd also let down all the viewers very badly. Quite right, too. You would never have caught Peter Purves or Valerie Singleton snorting coke down a nightclub.\n\nBut maybe the BBC should make absolutely sure that they have their own house in order before chucking one of their presenters under a bus. Blue Peter itself wasn't averse to cooking up the occasional scandalous incident over its long history. Here's one they made earlier.\n\nIt could be said that some of the most familiar faces from Blue Peter belonged to dogs rather than the human presenters. Depending on what decade you were watching the show, you might remember the name of the incumbent Blue Peter dog as either Shep, Goldie, Bonnie, or Mabel. But if you've got a really long memory, you might remember Petra, the original Blue Peter dog.\n\nPetra was still a tiny un-named eight-week-old puppy when she was first introduced to Blue Peter viewers near the Christmas of 1962. She acquired her name from a viewer's vote a week later and would go on to become the longest-serving Blue Peter dog, appearing on the show right up until her death at the grand old age of 15 in 1977. A bronze bust of the reportedly irritable and bad-tempered mongrel still stands today in the Blue Peter garden.\n\nBut it wasn't until 2008 that the show's editor of 23 years, Biddie Baxter, revealed that deception had been at work right near the very beginning, albeit under very sad circumstances. The eight-week-old puppy first introduced in 1962 had died from distemper just a couple of days after her TV debut. This left the production team in a quandary as the viewers were meant to be voting on the puppy's name. But rather than reveal the true fate of the original Petra, Biddy Baxter and a BBC producer trawled the pet shops of London until they eventually happened to find another lookalike puppy, shivering alone in the corner of a pen, that might just pass for a double. Not a single viewer noticed the switch, and the secret was safe for 46 years.\n\nOf course, it's perfectly understandable why the producers wanted to avoid upsetting the young viewers by telling them that a cute puppy had died. If nothing else, it might have dramatically changed the outcome of the viewer's vote. But rather less forgivable was what happened much later in 2007 in another incident relating to a viewer's vote to name a new Blue Peter pet.\n\nIn this case, it was a Blue Peter cat that would go on to be known as Socks. When the kitten was first introduced on the show, viewers were invited to vote for their favourite name via an online poll, and the result was announced a week later. Thankfully, this story doesn't involve a dead animal, as the same kitten definitely survived to hear the result. But it wasn't the right result. The young viewers had conclusively voted that they wanted to name the new cat 'Cookie'. Yet for reasons known only to himself, the serving Blue Peter editor, Richard Marson, decided that he didn't like it, and the decision was taken to completely ignore the genuine poll results and make out that the winning name had been 'Socks'.\n\nThe truth was soon sussed out by the press who accused the BBC of breaching the trust of the young audience by fabricating the results of polls. Long-running presenter Konnie Huq was part of the team offering a humble apology to viewers as they admitted that the original cat had been given the wrong name, and she sheepishly declared that they were making amends with the introduction of another new Blue Peter cat which would definitely be called Cookie.\n\nThis now makes us wonder if we could really trust the results of that 2002 BBC poll for the Greatest Briton in History. Did Winston really win that vote? Or could the genuine winner have been Noel Edmonds? We'll never know for sure.\n\nBut Blue Peter had actually been going through a pretty mischievous and dishonest phase in general around this time. Less than a year earlier, they'd been involved in a more serious slice of deception, and again it was poor old Konnie Huq who was shoved in front of the cameras to apologise, despite having nothing to do with the controversy.\n\nThe show is believed to have raised over £100 million over the years for charitable causes, and it was during an annual appeal for UNICEF in late 2006 that the BBC ended up copping for its first ever fine from Ofcom. The \"Shoe Biz\" appeal encouraged the viewers to phone a premium-rate phone line to be in with a chance of getting through to the live show and winning big prizes by correctly guessing the mystery celebrity owners of pairs of shoes.\n\nThere was already a little bit of controversy with regard to the idea of encouraging children to phone premium-rate telephone numbers. Yes, all the proceeds went to charity and the presenters urged viewers to get permission from their parents before racking up a fortune on the phone bill, but you wonder how many kids strictly followed this advice in their rush to get through to Blue Peter to win games and toys.\n\nAround 40,000 children were reported to have phoned in, but it turned out that not one of them had a chance of winning due to a technical fault on the day which prevented callers from getting through to the studio. At this point it might have been wise to come clean and inform the viewers that the whole phone-in had gone a bit pear-shaped, but a member of the production team had another idea: A young girl was visiting the studio at the time, and it was decided that she should pretend to be the winning caller from the other end of the studio. She was given a quick coaching session beforehand and told exactly what to say, whilst the presenters in the studio were left in the dark and under the impression that they were talking to a genuine winner on an external line. The show's editor, Richard Marson, was apparently also unaware of what was going on here, but it was reported that he later commended the member of the production team for using their initiative. Ofcom wasn't quite so impressed with the blatant deception, and they fined the BBC for the very first time, to the tune of £50,000.\n\nKonnie Huq was again wheeled out to issue the official apology which echoed the sentiments of Lorraine Heggessey's 1998 statement on Richard Bacon but this time making it clear that it was Blue Peter itself that had let the viewers down. Editor Richard Marson kept hold of his job after this one but not for very long. Perhaps surprisingly, it was the subsequent scandal involving the naming of the Blue Peter cat that appeared to bring him down. One inside source told the press: \"I think the feeling was that if we can't honestly name a Blue Peter cat, then really, that is perhaps the last straw in this whole fiasco.\" Neither Socks nor Cookie were available for comment, but we assume that they had both felt very let down by the programme.\n\nOne positive aspect of the more recent Blue Peter controversies is that the truth emerged very quickly, unlike the 46-year wait to discover the fate of the original Petra. But there was another pretty long wait – of around 25 years – before we learned the whole story of a much bigger BBC scandal involving a member of the Royal family. And for once, we're not talking about the man formerly known as Prince Andrew.\n\nThis incident relates to another episode of President Trump's favourite BBC show 'Panorama'. The BBC's flagship current-affairs series is the longest-running news magazine programme in the world and has been knocking around since 1953, but it was stoking up occasional controversies long before it was upsetting U.S presidents. And one of the biggest scandals of all relates to an episode broadcast in November 1995 which consisted of a rare and exclusive in-depth interview with Diana, Princess of Wales.\n\nBy this point, Diana and Prince Charles had been separated for just under three years, although there was no sign yet of a divorce on the horizon. Rumours had been swirling around since the 1980s that Prince Charles was embroiled in an affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles, and evidence of this had finally come to light in the early 1990s. The BBC journalist Martin Bashir had now scored a major scoop by persuading Diana to participate in a warts-and-all 'Panorama' interview and reveal her side of the story.\n\nA worldwide audience of over 200 million tuned in to hear The People's Princess talk candidly of how the marriage always felt a bit crowded as there were three people in the relationship. She also spoke of her own affair with James Hewitt, and revealed how she had been struggling with eating disorders and self-harming. The actual broadcast wasn't quite full-on warts-and-all, as an editorial decision was taken to remove some of Diana's derogatory comments about the Queen Mother. The BBC felt that it would reflect badly on the princess if she was heard dissing such a beloved and frail figure who was expected to pop her clogs at any minute, although as it panned out, the Queen Mother had another six years left on the clock.\n\nThe rest of the Royal family weren't exactly thrilled with a broadcast that had taken them quite by surprise. The Queen's response was to write to both Charles and Diana, insisting that they crack on with getting divorced. It may also have cost the BBC a long-running Christmas present. Ever since 1932, the serving monarch had delivered a message to the nation on Christmas Day which was exclusively produced and broadcast by the BBC. However, this deal was lost in 1996 when it was announced that ITV would be allowed to produce The Royal Message every other year whilst it would be broadcast simultaneously on both channels. The official line from Buckingham Palace was that this new arrangement reflected the composition of the modern television and radio industries. But cynics pointed out that it was a massive coincidence how this decision had been taken so quickly after the unwelcome broadcast of the Diana interview, almost as if the Royal Family were seeking vengeance on the BBC for giving Diana a platform without their approval.\n\nSo, it's true to say that the shocking interview ruffled more than a few feathers on the way to becoming the most-watched episode of 'Panorama' by quite some distance over the programme's 73-year history. But hang on, just how did Martin Bashir persuade Diana to bare her soul to the world?\n\nWell, firstly he approached her brother, Earl Spencer, armed with a fistful of bank statements, receipts, and other documents which proved that Diana should be very careful about who she trusts. The documents revealed that Diana's private secretary Patrick Jephson was accepting large sums of money to spy on his boss, whilst Charles's private secretary Richard Aylard had also been receiving substantial payments from some very dubious sources in the Channel Islands.\n\nEarl Spencer was advised that his sister should find another chauffeur, as her current one, Stephen Davies, was feeding the now-defunct 'Today' newspaper with stories. He was also shown bank statements which proved that his own former security guard, Alan Waller, had been taking suspicious payments from the UK press. And for an encore, he was told that Diana was being closely followed by MI5, and that the nanny of her children, Tiggy Legge-Bourke, had earlier been involved in an affair with her husband which had led to a pregnancy. Martin Bashir even had the receipts for the abortion clinic that Tiggy subsequently attended.\n\nThe whole idea seemed to be to persuade Earl Spencer that Martin Bashir was the man in the know, the man who could weed out the rogues in the inner circle and protect her from the press, and perhaps even the only man who Diana should be talking to in a major new television interview. The strategy worked; Within weeks of Bashir's first bombshell meeting with Earl Spencer, he had secured an interview with the Princess of Wales for 'Panorama'.\n\nHowever, Earl Spencer quickly became suspicious that he may have been deceived by Bashir in a plot to get an interview with the most famous woman in the world. And his suspicions grew when he found that what Bashir was now saying to his sister didn't always tally with what Bashir had been saying earlier. For example, Bashir was explaining to Diana that she was being followed by MI6 whereas he'd previously told Earl Spencer that she was being followed by MI5. In short, Spencer was beginning to sense that Martin Bashir was behaving in a way that could be described as a bit shifty.\n\nAnd he had good reason to be suspicious. All the documents supplied by Bashir did indeed prove that Diana should be very careful about who she trusts, but this should have started with Martin Bashir himself. None of the allegations made by Bashir were true, and the documents were all fakes, mocked up by a freelance graphic designer on the instructions of Bashir.\n\nHowever, the truth wouldn't be revealed in full for another 25 years, and in the meantime this deception led to some pretty serious and upsetting consequences. Diana's private secretary of eight years, Patrick Jephsen, resigned after finding that his relationship with Diana had suddenly broken down, although he had no idea why and wouldn't discover for another couple of decades how Bashir had effectively poisoned the relationship. Diane's chauffeur, Stephen Davies, was swiftly sacked from his job with no explanation. And less than two years after the broadcast, the Princess of Wales would be killed in a car crash without ever knowing that they had never betrayed her at all.\n\nThe freelance graphic designer who had mocked up the documents, Matt Wiessler, approached the BBC shortly after the broadcast because he had begun to feel uncomfortable about what Bashir had asked him to do. He was largely ignored and his career stalled as he was never invited to work for the BBC again. On a similar note, a senior producer on 'Panorama', Mark Killick, warned the BBC that Bashir appeared to have been using fake documentation to lure a member of the Royal family into giving an interview. The BBC felt that Killick was simply jealous of Bashir's incredible scoop, and promptly sacked him.\n\nIn fact, the BBC only began to reluctantly plod into half-hearted action after designer Matt Wiessler approached 'The Mail on Sunday' with the documents that he had forged, spawning the briefly sensational headline: \"DIANA'S BBC MAN AND FAKE BANK STATEMENTS!\"\n\nAn internal review was conducted in 1996, led by Tony Hall who was then the Head of News and Current Affairs, and would go on to become the future BBC director-general. But they may as well not have bothered. Key figures such as Matt Wiessler and Earl Spencer were not interviewed as part of the process. Instead, the BBC appeared to just put their faith in Martin Bashir who admitted to commissioning the false documents but insisted that he never showed anything like that to Diana, and they played no part in securing the interview. It was an odd defence because nobody had ever suggested that the forged documents had been shown to Diana. The whole point was that Bashir had been grooming Earl Spencer with these forgeries so that Spencer would pass on the information to his sister and pretty much secure the interview. Maybe Bashir was trying to imply that it wasn't his fault if Earl Spencer believed his lies and shared them with Diana.\n\nBut it didn't seem to matter either way. Despite Bashir admitting that he had been spending his time forging documents relating to the employees of the Princess of Wales, Tony Hall's internal review completely cleared him of any wrongdoing, even going so far as to describe him as \"an honest and honourable man.\" And that's how things were left for around fifteen years.\n\nBashir's faked documents may have lost quite a few people their jobs through no fault of their own, but he himself went on to enjoy a pretty lucrative career. He courted controversy again in 2003 with the documentary 'Living with Michael Jackson', although again this had no impact on his career. Bashir had spent eight months filming with Jackson, during which time the journalist was constantly singing his praises, admiring his skills as a father, and generally sucking up to The King of Pop big time. However, the subsequent documentary featured sneering narration from Bashir which painted Jackson in a negative light and poured suspicion over his relationships with young children. Jackson described the documentary as a \"betrayal\" and later revealed that he had only agreed to participate after Bashir had smugly described himself as \"The man who turned Diana's life around.\"\n\nBashir later moved to the States for twelve years where he worked as a news anchor and correspondent for the likes of ABC and NBC, before returning to the UK in 2016 where he was welcomed back with open arms by the BBC who appointed him as their Religious Editor. But the BBC finally lost their faith in this honest and honourable man when the long-delayed shit finally hit the fan in 2020.\n\nThe former BBC journalist Andy Webb had been brewing suspicions for years over the Diana documentary, and he was putting together his own documentary on the topic for Channel 4 when he obtained a stack of internal BBC memos obtained via a Freedom of Information request. The memos dating back to the 1996 internal review suggested that Earl Spencer had not been deceived by fake documents but had instead willingly provided Bashir with genuine confidential documents. Earl Spencer had been silent on the whole matter until now, but he was boiling over with fury when Adam Webb shared these memos with him, and he now felt obliged to publicly reveal the full details of Bashir's shifty behaviour.\n\nThe BBC was quick to offer an apology but Spencer demanded a full independent inquiry and that's exactly what he got. Martin Bashir himself wasn't particularly helpful in this new inquiry led by the senior judge Lord Dyson. The year was 2020 and he was apparently seriously ill with the aftereffects of COVID-19 and so was unable to offer his full co-operation. The Daily Mirror was quick to publish new photographs of Bashir which suggested that his supposedly serious health condition wasn't preventing him from picking up an order from the local takeaway. We're surprised he didn't just get it delivered by Uber.\n\nBashir was also healthy enough to engage in an email discussion with the BBC Head of History in which he offered a pretty lame defence. He wrote: \"I am sorry to hear that this so-called 'forgery' story has reared its head again. It played no part in the interview but did allow professional jealousy, particularly within the corporation, to hang its hat on alleged wrongdoing. At the time, it was also apparent that there was some irritation that a second-generation immigrant of non-white, working-class roots should have the temerity to enter a Royal Palace and conduct an interview. It would have been so much easier if one of the dynastic families (Dimbleby et al) had done it!\"\n\nThis does seem to be missing the point somewhat. It was Bashir's behaviour, not his roots, that were under scrutiny. And we suspect that neither of the Dimbleby brothers would ever have resorted to forging fake documents, peddling lies, destroying relationships, and getting people fired in order to secure a scoop.\n\nBashir had already stepped down from his role as Religious Editor on health grounds by the time the results of the Dyson Report were published in 2021, and it pulled no punches. Lord Dyson found that Martin Bashir had consistently lied over his reprehensible behaviour to gain the trust of Diana by using deceitful and deceptive tactics. The report also criticised Tony Hall's original 1996 internal review, describing it as \"woefully ineffective\" and concluding that \"Without justification, the BBC fell short of the high standards of integrity and transparency which are its hallmark.\"\n\nLord Michael Grade, a former BBC1 controller and chairman, felt that the BBC had deliberately covered up the truth, and that their behaviour was even worse than Bashir's. He ranted: \"It's taken 25 years to get the truth. It raises the question in your mind; how many more cover-ups are there in the files of BBC journalism that we haven't been told about?\"\n\nOf course, the fact that it took 25 years meant that there was little subsequent accountability from those involved in the original botched internal enquiry as just about everybody had moved on since then. Tony Hall went on to become Baron Hall of Birkenhead and was the director-general of the BBC for seven years between 2013 and 2020. In the aftermath of the Dyson Report, he admitted that he had been wrong to give Bashir \"the benefit of the doubt\" but the only fresh inconvenience he endured was his resignation as chairman of the board of The National Gallery, a post he relinquished on the grounds that his continued presence on the board was a \"distraction.\" Tim Suter, another former BBC executive who played a central role in the 1996 inquiry, also stepped down from his current role on the board of Ofcom. Suter had actually been one of the founding partners of Ofcom in 2003 but stepped down by mutual agreement in the wake of the damning Dyson report.\n\nAside from that, it was the contemporary version of the BBC that paid the price for the 25-year-old scandal, and they had to dig pretty deep into their pockets when it came to paying out substantial payments to all those who had been wronged by Bashir's actions and the subsequent failed internal inquiry. We're not quite talking in the same league as the $10 billion sought by President Trump, but even so, it wasn't a cheap round for the BBC. Settlements ranging from a reported £20,000 to £750,000 were paid out separately to the sacked chauffeur Stephen Davies, Earl Spencer's security guard Allan Waller, the nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke, and Diana's private secretary, Patrick Jephsen, who was paid a reported £100,000 which he donated to charity. The highest settlements were believed to have been paid out to the ignored and sacked whistleblower producer Mark Killick, and the ignored and blacklisted whistleblower designer Matt Wiessler. Whilst details are vague relating to Mark Killick, it's reported that Matt Weissler was given £750,000.\n\nOn top of this, the BBC also donated around £1.5 million to the Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, and this came from the profits that the overseas sales of the original Panorama interview had generated. But as for the other costly settlements…well, if you paid your TV licence in recent years, then you helped to pay the bill for sorting out the mess that the BBC had made 25 years earlier. We're sure that news will give you a warm glow of pleasure.\n\nThe relatives of Diana were hardly feeling warm glows of pleasure towards the BBC after the publication of the Dyson Report, and her children certainly had a lot to say. Prince William released a statement in May 2021 in which he said of his mother: \"It brings indescribable sadness to know that the BBC's failures contributed significantly to her fear, paranoia and isolation that I remember from those final years with her. But what saddens me most, is that if the BBC had properly investigated the complaints and concerns first raised in 1995, my mother would have known that she had been deceived. She was failed not just by a rogue reporter, but by leaders at the BBC who looked the other way rather than asking the tough questions.\"\n\nPrince Harry went further in his own statement released on the same day in which he implied that this kind of behaviour had contributed in some way to his mother's death. He said: \"The ripple effect of a culture of exploitation and unethical practices ultimately took her life. What deeply concerns me is that practices like these—and even worse—are still widespread today. Then, and now, it's bigger than one outlet, one network, or one publication. Our mother lost her life because of this, and nothing has changed.\"\n\nEarl Spencer has been rather more blunt in his comments in which he draws a direct parallel between the Bashir interview and Diana's death. He feels that Bashir's lies led to Diana losing trust in the key people around her, leaving her without adequate protection. And he still feels that not everyone involved has been held accountable. As recently as November 2025, he said: \"There are high-ranking people in the BBC who participated in securing this interview, through appalling deception. I am sure that this led directly to Diana being left vulnerable in Paris on the night she died.\"\n\nAt the other end of the argument, there are those who feel that whilst the actions of Martin Bashir and the BBC were unforgivable, we shouldn't be getting carried away and blowing things out of proportion. Biographer Andrew Morton believes that Diana was ready to speak her mind at the time, and there's an argument that she would have said broadly the same things in an interview whether she was speaking to Martin Bashir or not. It's not as if she spent the interview discussing betrayal from her employees or being spied on by intelligence services. She was there to talk about her health struggles and her marriage. The interview may have panned out in exactly the same way with or without faked bank statements. Bashir now says that he deeply regrets his \"stupid\" actions but maintains that Diana had complete control of the actual interview and that the broadcast did not harm her in any way. Even the Dyson Report conceded that if forged documents had not been involved, Diana would probably still have agreed to the interview with Bashir.\n\nAnd then we have the word of Diana herself. During the original internal review, she had provided a genuine handwritten note for the BBC which read: \"Martin Bashir did not show me any documents nor give me any information that I was not previously aware of. I consented to the interview on Panorama without any undue pressure and have NO regrets.\"\n\nSo it's a complicated pickle, but it's still worth emphasizing that Diana did seem to be getting indirectly fed with false information from Bashir that shattered her trust in those around her and cost the jobs of a bunch of loyal people who had done nothing wrong.\n\nSeveral cabinet members of the serving Conservative government, including Prime Minister Boris Johnson, expressed their disdain and concern over how the BBC had handled this mess. Home Secretary Priti Patel talked of looking at new ways of governing the BBC and refused to rule out criminal prosecutions on this matter, although things have fallen pretty quiet on that front since then.\n\nMind you, the serving Conservative government had consistently clashed with the BBC before and after the revelations from the Dyson Report. Come to think of it, just about every serving government and opposition party has consistently clashed with the BBC over the last century. The arguments and public spats covered a variety of topics but more often than not, it usually boiled down to that age-old matter of \"due impartiality\" and perceived political bias.\n\nThe official mission statement of the British Broadcasting Corporation, as outlined in its current Royal Charter is: \"To act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality, and distinctive output and services which inform, educate, and entertain.\"\n\nBut how many times over the years has it broken that promise of impartiality, and is it even a promise that is remotely possible to keep? To explore the answer to that one, we should delve much deeper back into history to unravel a comical long-running feud with Winston Churchill, and the very beginnings of the Beeb when it appeared to be firmly in the pockets of the UK government and barely even pretending to be impartial. Could it be true that the BBC was founded on a stinking lie?\n\n## The Thick of It\n\nThe BBC had faced hostile opponents even before it was launched as a radio broadcasting company way back in 1922. These were the days before the BBC was even a corporation with a Royal Charter. Instead, the British Broadcasting Company as it was then known, was a monopoly operation jointly owned by a consortium of six leading manufacturers of wireless radios. The whole point of the business was to shift more radio sets with the launch of a new broadcasting service which would be largely funded by the fresh profits.\n\nThe British press naturally wasn't so taken with the idea and viewed this new-fangled radio service as a threat to their business model. Why would anybody want to buy a newspaper featuring yesterday's news when listeners could tune into real-time news bulletins? The Press Association initially argued that the BBC shouldn't be allowed to run news bulletins at all, but a compromise was eventually reached in which the radio service could only broadcast bulletins after 7pm, and even then it could only use existing copyrighted material from news agencies rather than employing their own journalists.\n\nThe BBC also faced heavy restrictions on sport reports, leading to a memorably farcical live broadcast in 1926 from the Epsom Derby in which they weren't allowed to describe what was going on in the race or who had won, but instead just tried to convey the atmosphere of the occasion with cheering crowds and stomping hooves.\n\nBut it was that very same year that the new broadcaster stumbled into what might be described as a pivotal moment in its history – and that was the General Strike of 1926. In the face of shrinking profits in the UK's coal mining industry, over a million miners were now being expected to work longer hours in poorer conditions for significantly less money. In an attempt to compel the Conservative government to intervene, the General Council of the Trades Union Congress called a General Strike which came into effect on the 4th of May.\n\nOver one and a half million workers from various industries supported this gesture of sympathy for the miners, causing massive disruption right across the nation. The strikers included transport workers, dockers, construction workers, and crucially it also impacted the printing presses which meant that most of the UK newspapers ground to a temporary halt and were unable to report on this major ongoing story. With newspapers out of the picture, this left the BBC as the only reliable source of information on the strike, and for the first time it was allowed to broadcast regular news bulletins throughout the day. But how exactly was the BBC going to cope with this new burden of responsibility and how was this independent broadcaster going to fairly convey both sides of the argument?\n\nWell, that was a decision for the original BBC General Manager, John Reith. It's quite remarkable how this 6 foot 6 Scottish engineer managed to land the job, considering that he didn't have that much experience in management, and that he later admitted he knew nothing at all about broadcasting and couldn't even comprehend some of the questions thrown to him during the interview. We can only assume that not many others applied for the post.\n\nNow, Reith himself was against the General Strike and very much in agreement with the serving Prime Minister of the Conservative government, Stanley Baldwin, who felt that the General Strike was an attack on constitutional government, a challenge to parliament, and was putting the UK on the path to anarchy and ruin. There are of course two sides to every argument and we won't dive too far into the detail here. It's worth pointing out that the owners of the coal mines weren't just trying to annoy their own workforce out of spite. Following the First World War, the British coal mining industry entered a prolonged period of decline for a variety of reasons and difficult decisions had to be made. At the same time, these wealthy mine owners probably weren't facing too many hardships themselves as they increased the hours and slashed the wages of their employees.\n\nWhilst John Reith may have formed his own opinions, he was still keen for the independent BBC to broadcast arguments from both sides of the conflict – those who believed firmly that all the strikers should get back to work and restore normality to Britain, and those who believed that the strike should only end with a triumphant result for the overworked and underpaid miners. However, the Prime Minister had other ideas.\n\nStanley Baldwin was invited to make a broadcast to the nation from John Reith's own home, in which he made an impassioned plea for strikers to return to work. On Baldwin's request, Reith made several adjustments to the draft of the speech to make it more compelling, and in fact he was even making last-minute adjustments as Baldwin was reading it live on air.\n\nBut the leader of the Labour party, Ramsay MacDonald, and the leaders of the Trades Union Congress, were not given the courtesy of a right to reply. Whilst Reith himself had been happy to accept the requests of the opposition to voice their own opinions on the BBC, Stanley Baldwin made it clear to Reith that he did not approve of that idea at all.\n\nThrown into a bit of a quandary, how did the boss of the supposedly neutral broadcasting company respond? In the interests of fairness and impartiality, did he resist the push from the government to silence the voice of the opposition? He did not.\n\nOver the nine-day course of the strike, and in the absence of any print media, the sole outlet for news only gave a platform to those who agreed with the stance of the government and the mine owners, whilst we barely heard a peep from anyone who actually supported the one and a half million strikers. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury's request to broadcast a \"peace appeal\" on the BBC was turned down by Reith under heavy persuasion from the prime minister. This was probably because the Archbishop and other church leaders had come up with a proposal in which the miners wouldn't see their wages getting slashed if the government provided subsidies to the struggling coal industry, an idea which wasn't part of the government's holy plan. So the BBC had even shut down one of God's right-hand men.\n\nPerhaps this blanket ban on alternative viewpoints partly explains why the General Strike only lasted nine days before it was called off by the TUC without a single concession ever being made. The miners fruitlessly stayed out on strike for another eight months. Whilst many of them would remain unemployed for years, the ones that did return to work were forced to accept the longer hours and the lower wages.\n\nIt does seem quite odd that whilst subsequent governments would usually complain that the BBC was biased against them, here was a very early example of the exact opposite. And another quite remarkable point here is that Winston Churchill – who at this point was the serving Chancellor of the Exchequer – still didn't feel that the BBC went quite far enough in its total subservience to the government's aggressive demands. He actually believed that the coverage was still too impartial if anything, and he was lobbying for the prime minister to commandeer the BBC so that it could be used as a propaganda tool. But more on Winston in just a moment.\n\nIn the meantime, the new British Broadcasting Company was facing heavy criticism from Labour MPs, TUC leaders, and supporters of the strike over its biased coverage, with Labour leader Ramsay Macdonald suggesting that the BBC had misled the public. John Reith made what might feel like a startling admission in the pages of his own recently launched magazine 'The Radio Times' when he conceded that the BBC was not entirely independent from the government, and that complete impartiality during a national emergency should not be expected. He also noted that under emergency regulations, the government would have had every right to take over the BBC.\n\nAn even more startling admission was privately made in the pages of his diary when he wrote: \"The government know they can trust us not to be really impartial.\"\n\nSo just how shocked should we feel by this? Wasn't the BBC supposedly built on the foundations of being utterly impartial? And doesn't this mean that they were lying to us right from the very beginning? Well…no, not quite.\n\nIt's a bit of a misconception that the BBC was created on a promise of impartiality. Yes, it was an independent company but it was also fundamentally a private commercial company run by radio manufacturers. The original focus of the BBC wasn't so much about serving the public with impartial output but more about just trying to shift more radio sets.\n\nIt soon became apparent that this idea wasn't working out so well, largely because the public decided that they preferred to either buy the cheaper unofficial radio sets or build their own. The radio manufacturers quickly realised that they needed to jump ship from this loss-making broadcasting operation, and by 1927 the government accepted a proposal to effectively kill off The British Broadcasting Company and transform it into The British Broadcasting Corporation.\n\nThis new corporation was granted a Royal Charter which meant that it was now a non-commercial institution, completely independent from any direct influence from the government, or as near as dammit. And it was only at this point that the new BBC really began to bang on for the first time about its core mission to uphold due impartiality, as laid out in the Royal Charter.\n\nThe point is that it was only allowed to reach this point thanks to the shrewd manoeuvring and reluctant concessions of John Reith during the General Strike. Reith was admittedly a bit of a strange bloke at times. It's often noted that he would go on to become a bit of a fan of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. His diary entries praise Hitler's \"magnificent efficiency\" whilst expressing confidence that \"The Nazis will clean things up and put Germany on the way to being a real power in Europe again.\"\n\nIn fairness, we have to remember that plenty of people were applauding Hitler in the 1930s. Even the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, was referring to him as one of the greatest men he had ever met. John Reith would have held a very different viewpoint in 1940 when he was serving as The Minister of Information during the Second World War and actively fighting against Nazi propaganda.\n\nBut back in 1926, Reith was fighting an altogether different kind of villain who went by the name of Winston Churchill. When Churchill was lobbying Stanley Baldwin to commandeer the BBC and use it as a propaganda tool, his efforts were being taken very seriously. Baldwin was giving it some serious consideration. It was just one day before the end of the General Strike that Baldwin made a formal decision not to commandeer the BBC, a decision which grumpy old Churchill later described as \"monstrous.\"\n\nBut this decision is likely to have been heavily influenced by the recent concessions of John Reith and his impossible balancing act of attempting to maintain some kind of independence whilst appeasing the government. If Reith had played hard ball and insisted on broadcasting voices in support of the strike, it's possible that Churchill's argument to take over the BBC would have sounded a lot more compelling to Stanley Baldwin. By playing the long game and playing for time, John Reith paved the way for what would become the arguably impartial British Broadcasting Corporation, at which point his role changed from General Manager to the first ever Director-General of the new BBC.\n\nThe corporation was no longer restricted to broadcasting news bulletins only after 7pm, and they were allowed to employ their own journalists for the first time. They were even allowed to talk about what was actually going on when they were broadcasting from horse racing events. This was clearly a very different kind of BBC, and one which may never have existed had Reith not fought off the attack from Churchill.\n\nReith may not have been particularly proud of bending over to the government during the strike, but he felt the ends justified the means. As he put it himself: \"I did what I didn't approve of myself doing. But I was so frightened of what Churchill would make of it.\"\n\nReith may have won this significant battle but the war between Churchill and the BBC would rage on for decades. Well, it could be argued that it was more of a personal war between Winston Churchill and Lord Reith who received a knighthood in 1927 in recognition of his services to broadcasting, and would later be given a seat in The House of Lords in 1940.\n\nThese two really disliked each other, to put it mildly. The short and portly Churchill referred to his six foot six nemesis as \"That Wuthering Height.\" During a speech that Churchill made for The Royal Society of St George in 1934 that was being broadcast live by the BBC, he really took the opportunity to poke fun at the corporation and the director-general. He told the audience: \"You see these microphones? They have been placed on our tables by the British Broadcasting Corporation. Think of the risk these eminent men are running. We can almost see them in our mind's eye, gathered together in that very expensive building with the questionable statues on its front. We can picture Sir John Reith, with the perspiration mantling on his lofty brow, with his hand on the control switch, wondering, as I utter every word, whether it will not be his duty to protect his innocent subscribers from some irreverent thing I might say about Mr. Gandhi, or about the Bolsheviks, or even about our peripatetic Prime Minister. But let me reassure him. I have much more serious topics to discuss. I have to speak to you about St. George and the Dragon.\"\n\nJohn Reith was rather more succinct in his appraisal of Churchill in a diary entry from 1941: \"I absolutely hate him.\"\n\nA big part of the beef between the two was Churchill's perception that he had been blacklisted from the BBC between around 1928 to 1939. This wasn't technically true. We've literally just heard that he was slagging off the BBC on their own live broadcast in 1934, and he did make a few other brief addresses during the 1930s. But they were surprisingly rare for a man who would later be crowned the Greatest Briton in History, and many of his specific requests to make a broadcast were turned down.\n\nAt one point in 1929, Churchill even offered to pay the BBC a hundred pounds from his own pocket to make a political broadcast in what might have been seen as an attempt to bribe the corporation into letting him speak. Reith turned down the offer on the principle that he had no desire to follow what he viewed as the American model of allowing any old witless fool to broadcast for the right price.\n\nBy 1938, Churchill was publicly declaring that he had been muzzled and \"very badly treated\" by the BBC, although he obviously wasn't publicly declaring this on the BBC. He later privately told his doctor: \"For eleven years, they kept me off the air. They prevented me from expressing views that proved to be right. Their behaviour has been tyrannical. They are honeycombed with Socialist…probably with Communists.\"\n\nBut was it true to say that Churchill had been unfairly banned, possibly due to the bitter ongoing feud with John Reith? Well again, not quite.\n\nIn his efforts to strive for political impartiality, Reith had left it up to the leaderships of each political party to decide which member got to speak on their behalf. This meant that prominent cabinet and shadow cabinet ministers were the ones usually selected to get their voices on the airwaves. The fact is that the future prime minister Churchill was a low-key backbencher during the 1930s, a period now described as his \"wilderness years.\" It's not that he was banned by the BBC, it was simply that he wasn't considered important or relevant enough at the time by either the BBC, his own party, or the general public. Rather than accept this uncomfortable truth, Churchill preferred to complain that he was being stifled by the evil BBC. By modern standards, it's a bit like Liz Truss complaining that she's been barred from presenting her own weekly primetime TV show on Expert Economics.\n\nIt could be said that Churchill did eventually extract some form of vengeance over both Lord Reid and, much later on, the BBC that he so clearly despised. By the beginning of 1940, Reith had moved on from the BBC and had taken on the wartime position of Minister of Information in Neville Chamberlain's cabinet. Reith wasn't actually tied to a political party, but he had been elected unopposed in a by-election in Southampton as a \"National\" candidate serving a Conservative-led coalition government. It was destined to be a brief appointment, though. When Winston Churchill became prime minister in May 1940, his old foe was promptly booted out of the new war ministry.\n\nThe animosity was clearly still in full swing in 1942 when Churchill offered Reith the role of Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. This had actually been a position that Reith had always craved, and one that he would eventually accept 25 years later in 1967. But there was no way he was going to accept it from Churchill. On the same day that he rejected the role in 1942, his diary entry simply notes: \"Invitation from that bloody shit Churchill to be Lord High Commissioner.\"\n\nChurchill didn't seem to be a massive fan of television, and whilst he had spent years fruitlessly trying to get heard on the radio, he spent much of the 1950s trying to avoid getting his face on the idiot lantern. Some have suggested that this was because he was growing self-conscious about his age and his appearance, but he himself claimed that he just regarded the visual format as vulgar.\n\nThe event that really put television on the map and sparked a huge surge in sales of TV sets was of course the 1953 Coronation, but Churchill had been of the opinion that it shouldn't be televised at all, believing that it would be distasteful and too intrusive for the Queen. It was the Queen herself who strongly disagreed and insisted that the Coronation be seen by as many people as possible. That figure was estimated to be around 20 million which might sound a bit surprising as there were no more than three million of these fancy new television contraptions in the UK at the time, but this includes millions of people who were huddled around the sets of their posher neighbours.\n\nBut Winston Churchill did get his way when it came to breaking the BBC's television monopoly in 1954. The idea had been floated in the early '50s that commercial independent broadcasters should be given an opportunity to provide an alternative to the TV-hogging BBC. John Reith may have no longer worked at the corporation but he was vocal in his strong disapproval of the idea. As he put it: \"Somebody introduced dog-racing into England, and somebody introduced smallpox, bubonic plague, and the Black Death. Somebody is minded now to introduce sponsored television.\" He went into a little more detail when he addressed The House of Lords in a passionate appeal for government ministers to protect the BBC's monopoly and preserve the public service heritage, denouncing the idea of commercial television as a shocking and unnecessary betrayal.\n\nHe wasn't alone in his disdain for the idea. Politicians from all parties, church leaders, and official bodies all vented their protests, with the former Labour Lord Chancellor, Earl Jowitt, warning ministers to take a look at the state of American commercial television of which he clearly wasn't much of an admirer. He quoted P.G Wodehouse when he described it as: \"The foulest, ghastliest, loathsomest nightmare ever Inflicted by science on a suffering human race.\"\n\nIn truth, Winston Churchill probably wasn't a big supporter of the idea, either. If he thought the BBC was vulgar, just wait until he cops a load of ITV. But even so, he passed the 1954 Television Act which established an Independent Television Authority and paved the way for the launch of ITV in 1955. The BBC had lost their monopoly which was a bitter blow to the corporation, fuelled by what some might say was a bitter response from Churchill who was seeking revenge for his bad treatment.\n\nFormer BBC political editor Nick Robinson believes that the end of the monopoly and the creation of a brand new channel was the real legacy of the long-running feud between Churchill and Reith. Others suggest that this might be a bit over-dramatic as Churchill didn't seem massively interested either way in a proposal that was largely pushed forward by young Conservative MPs. But it was still Churchill that signed on the dotted line in what may well have been his final small victory in his epic war with the BBC.\n\nThe BBC would continue to battle with serving British governments right up until the present day and most likely well beyond. Margaret Thatcher's government spent much of their time at loggerheads with the Beeb in the 1980s. The coverage of The Falklands Conflict in 1982 provoked particular outrage from the government, mainly because the BBC insisted on referring to British soldiers as British soldiers instead of \"our soldiers.\" The fury really boiled over when Newsnight presenter Peter Snow began a sentence with the words \"If we believe the British…\" implying that we shouldn't necessarily trust what our own government is telling us.\n\nThatcher clearly felt that the BBC should be patriotically cheering on our own soldiers and booing the Argentinian enemy. She condemned the coverage which she claimed treated the enemy like equals, whilst Conservative MP John Page described Peter Snow's comments as \"almost treasonable.\" The BBC's own guidelines at the time had stated: \"We are not Britain. We are the BBC.\" And in their defence, they pointed out that it is not the BBC's role to boost the morale of troops, and that the widow in Portsmouth was no different from the widow of Buenos Aires.\n\nThatcher just didn't seem to care for the BBC at all, and had a particular issue with the director-general Alasdair Milne whom she found chiefly responsible for all the failings. She frequently accused the corporation of left-wing bias, despite the fact that the BBC actually devoted significantly more airtime to the Conservatives than Labour during the 1980s. She also felt that the journalistic standards were poor, the news coverage was often irresponsible, and many of the TV shows were distasteful and offensive.\n\nShe did have a couple of weapons in her armoury which she deployed in her own battle against the BBC with mixed results. A memo from Downing Street revealed that she was already planning to quote \"Knock the BBC down to size\" very shortly after she came to power. She had come up with an idea of allowing viewers to opt out of paying for a TV licence and instead just buying a TV set that could only receive ITV. Some viewers at the time probably thought that this was not a bad idea. The whole concept of a TV licence funding the BBC was already feeling a little outdated after the introduction of an alternative commercial channel in 1955, and it's a concept that would become increasingly controversial in the decades to follow as we became spoilt for choice with the ever-growing number of channels. However, the idea never really got any further than that memo, perhaps because it would have been a massive expensive pain for manufacturers to produce new kinds of sets that were more restrictive than usual sets.\n\nBut then Thatcher came after the TV licence again in 1985 in what appeared to be a bid to force the BBC into evolving into just another commercial channel funded by advertising rather than a public service broadcaster with a Royal Charter. The government set up an inquiry headed by a guy called Professor Peacock who may have sounded like a character from Cluedo but was actually a leading economist.\n\nThe purpose of The Peacock Committee was to examine alternative ways to fund the BBC, and the government were expecting Peacock to conclude that the licence fee should be scrapped to make way for advertising. But that's not what happened at all. Peacock's strong recommendation was to keep the licence fee as introducing advertising on the BBC would have an unnecessarily harmful impact on ITV, and lead to a rapid decline in quality all-round as both channels chased the big ratings that would win over the relatively small pot of advertisers.\n\nThatcher did manage to score a couple of notable if slightly sinister triumphs, though. We mentioned earlier that the Royal Charter enables the institution to have independence from any direct influence from the government, but it's not quite total independence. As well as regularly reviewing and renewing the charter, the serving government also gets to choose the Chairman and the board of governors of the BBC, and many would point out that this does give the government a certain amount of influence over the corporation.\n\nHistorically, the serving government didn't abuse this power and usually strived to fill up the board of governors with a politically diverse mix of appointees, or even just significant figures with no strong political bias at all. Not so with Thatcher. She pretty much stuffed the board of governors full of staunch Conservatives and loyal Thatcherites in what may have felt like a shameless attempt to really sink her fangs into the corporation, although her reasoning was that she was trying to reshape an organisation with a left-wing bias. So, on the one hand she was complaining that the BBC was biased, and on the other hand she was ensuring that only card-carrying Tories were allowed to play on the board.\n\nAs if that wasn't enough, she also installed the Tory-friendly Marmaduke Hussey as the new Chairman of the BBC in 1986, and within just three months he and the board of Tory governors had got rid of the director-general Alasdair Milne with whom Thatcher had been having so much grief. Apparently, Milne was hauled into the office and told that he must resign immediately or be sacked. He had left the BBC building with all his belongings within 25 minutes of the surprise meeting, later describing the board of governors as \"a bunch of amateurs.\"\n\nAnd these were quite disturbing times for the BBC. Nearly sixty years after supposedly gaining true independence from the government, Margaret Thatcher was making it abundantly clear that this independence only went so far and that even the mighty BBC shouldn't mess with the Iron Lady. Thankfully, this kind of thing was dialled back again in later years, and subsequent governments took more balanced approaches in selecting governors and chairmen, give or take a bit of a wobble during the Boris Johnson era.\n\nBut still the sparring between the BBC and Westminster has never really stopped. Tony Blair's Labour government went to war with the BBC in 2003 when they furiously denied a reporter's claim that a senior official had admitted the Iraq dossier had been \"sexed up\" to strengthen the case for war. This was a tragic case which led to the senior official in question, Dr David Kelly, taking his own life. And it also led to The Hutton Inquiry which was highly critical of the BBC's editorial processes and resulted in the swift resignations of both the serving BBC Chairman and Director-General.\n\nMoving forward to 2014, David Cameron's government were so furious with the BBC's allegedly biased coverage of the Autumn Statement and their \"systematic exaggeration\" that, according to political editor Nick Robinson, Cameron had threatened to close down the BBC after the next election.\n\nBoris Johnson often threatened to scrap the licence fee whilst Liz Truss has recently revealed that she believes the BBC to be an \"outrageous organisation\" which is the epitome of what has gone wrong with Britain and should be defunded immediately. She also expressed how she and other Brits are cheering on President Trump with his $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC, and that she would prefer to see our TV licence money going towards Trump's administration rather than the BBC. We're not sure just how many Brits would genuinely agree with the idea of all the money we paid out for a public service broadcaster getting diverted into the hands of an American president. But it's probably not an entirely relevant question anyway, on several fronts.\n\nLet's just say hypothetically that Trump wins the lawsuit and is awarded the full $10 billion in damages. That's a bit of a stretch but bear with us for a second. There seems to be an idea that in such a scenario, it would be the TV licence payer that ultimately foots the bill. The problem there is the BBC doesn't have anything close to $10 billion in its coffers. It raises about three and a half billion pounds a year from the licence fee but that has already been allocated to programming. To be blunt, the BBC would be stuffed if it suddenly had to find $10 billion, and would potentially require a bailout from the government to survive. That would essentially mean that it's the taxpayer who would carry the burden.\n\nBearing that in mind, you'd think that Keir Starmer would be a little worried about the results of the lawsuit, and might be rushing to the defence of the BBC. But so far, he has refused to get involved and has only commented that the BBC needs to get its house in order. Liz Truss hates the Beeb so much that she's probably still cheering on Trump in the firm belief that it's better to give our tax to the Trump administration than keep it within the UK economy.\n\nBut just how likely is a victory for Trump? Well, not very likely at all. For starters, he would need to prove that the episode of 'Panorama' was broadcast in Florida where the lawsuit was filed. The BBC insists that it was only ever broadcast in the UK and that even the availability of the episode on iPlayer was restricted to the UK. It's possible that viewers in Florida could have accessed the episode by using a VPN, but it would be hard to pin any blame on the BBC for that, and the amount of viewers who would have bothered to do so is likely to be tiny.\n\nTrump would also need to prove that the edited clips broadcast in 2024 caused him reputational harm. You probably don'tneed us to remind you that Trump went on to win the election, so it's hard to see just how much reputational harm was inflicted on him by a programme broadcast in the UK that might have been seen by a few viewers in Florida who circumvented the geographical block. On top of that, he would need to prove that the clips were edited with actual malicious intent which again could be quite tricky. It's clear that the BBC made a mistake with the splicing together of these clips, but surely not a $10 billion mistake. Even if the BBC is ordered to make a payment to Trump, the figure is likely to be nowhere remotely close to $10 billion because the man who went on to win the election surely didn't suffer $10 billion worth of damage. If anything, it's a little surprising that Trump has made the decision to file the lawsuit and bring attention back to the controversial speech in the first place. Some might say that he's not really interested in getting any money, he's just making a big dramatic point. But in doing so, he's reminding everyone that this speech led to him getting impeached for incitement to insurrection by the U.S. House of Representatives. The speech was also heavily referenced when he was later indicted on four felony counts relating to trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. None of this mattered much in the long term, of course. He was acquitted in the Senate impeachment trial just a month later, and those four charges were dropped when he won the next election as apparently you don't get to prosecute a sitting president. But in launching the lawsuit, he's dragging all this right back into the spotlight and with no obvious reward. At the time of recording this video, the BBC are currently seeking to get the case dismissed, and we'll watch how things unfold with interest. But it seems very improbable that the outcome will involve the BBC making any kind of major payout to a man who claimed that they were putting words in his mouth with artificial intelligence. Condolences to Liz Truss, but we don't think Trump is the man destined to take down the insufferably smug and sanctimonious leftist propaganda machine that we call the BBC. And that brings us to the final question. In light of all we've heard, can we really trust the BBC to be as impartial as it promises to be in the Royal Charter? If we were being pedantic, we could say that the BBC can never be truly impartial, as that would involve giving a fair and equal platform to all kinds of people including holocaust deniers, flat Earthers, cult leaders, Nazis, sex offenders, and fans of Nickelback. Instead, the Royal Charter requires the BBC to provide \"due impartiality\" which involves giving appropriate weight to certain perspectives based on evidence and public consensus. And that itself makes people suspicious as the BBC themselves are having to make these daily judgement calls on what is considered to be acceptable, although this is surely a healthier scenario than running a weekly TV show called \"Homophobic Hour.\" One surprising insider opinion came from former BBC political editor Andrew Marr in 2006. During an internal BBC seminar on impartiality, he stated quite clearly: \"The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It's a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities, and gay people. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.\" Members of the public agree with Andrew Marr that the corporation is biased, but the crucial difference is that they can't quite make up their minds in which direction. A recent YouGov poll from 2025 found that nearly half of viewers believed the BBC to be biased, but 31% felt that it was biased in favour of left-wing views whilst 19% felt that it was biased in favour of right-wing views. 31% responded that they didn't know – presumably because they only watch Channel 5 - and only 19% felt that the BBC was not politically biased. But whilst we often hear claims that the BBC is a left-wing or anti-Conservative organisation, it's worth remembering the closest the corporation came to having dangerous impartiality at its very core was when Margaret Thatcher and, to a lesser extent, Boris Johnson, filled up the board of governors with devout Tories, leading in the former case to the swift removal of a Director-General with whom the prime minister was engaged in a war of words. Thatcher and Johnson would no doubt argue that this was a necessary step to combat the corporation's heavy bias against them. But the BBC has always copped the flak from both sides, and they've been embroiled in vicious battles with Labour governments over the decades. In fact it's difficult to think of any serving government in history that had what could be described as a good relationship with the BBC. One line of thinking here is that if both sides of the political spectrum are getting their knickers in a twist about perceived impartiality then the BBC must be somewhere close to striking the right balance. Perhaps the truth is that any serving government believes the BBC are against them when it becomes clear they're not being relentlessly showered with gushing praise and support, which of course is not the BBC's job. Right now, Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer will probably be feeling quite annoyed that the BBC are constantly talking about how much longer he can cling onto his position instead of cheerfully banging on about all his wonderful achievements. If you already have deep-rooted opinions about the impartiality of the BBC then we're not here to change your mind either way. It's worth considering that it's pretty tough – maybe even impossible - to be consistently impartial at all times when news editors and journalists are making quick decisions involving time restraints and narrative and framing, whilst constantly facing hostile scrutiny and criticism at every turn. And perhaps it's too easy to just pick out occasional items that they got wrong from millions of hours of broadcasting and then loudly conclude that the BBC is bent. On the other hand, some would argue that they've made far too many mistakes over the years, and that we shouldn't need to continue funding a supposedly impartial public service broadcaster from our own pockets in the modern era. It would be strange to consider a future without the BBC, or at least a drastically slimmed-down BBC without a Royal Charter and reliant on either advertising or optional subscriptions. And whilst the corporation may have its critics today, just imagine how different things could have been if The Greatest Briton in History had got his way and seized the BBC as a propaganda tool for the government. Letters of complaint would have been flooding into 'Points of View' except of course that other points of view would never have been broadcast on such a network. In light of this, we think the BBC should run another poll for The Greatest Briton in History to see if we can get a better result next time. A word of caution, though. If it involves a telephone vote, for God's sake don't put 'Blue Peter' in charge of it.  Key Takeaways  The BBC has faced accusations of political bias and deceptive editing from powerful figures across the political spectrum throughout its century-long history. A 2025 Panorama documentary misleadingly spliced Trump's January 2021 speech, prompting a $10 billion lawsuit and resignations of two senior BBC executives. Martin Bashir used forged documents to secure Princess Diana's 1995 Panorama interview; the BBC covered up this deception for 25 years before the Dyson Report exposed it. BBC founder John Reith privately admitted the government could trust the BBC not to be truly impartial, particularly during the 1926 General Strike when opposition voices were silenced. Winston Churchill feuded with the BBC for decades, claiming he was muzzled during his wilderness years, though the article suggests he simply wasn't prominent enough for airtime then.    Frequently Asked Questions What was the 'Crowngate' scandal involving the BBC and Queen Elizabeth II?In 2007, the BBC aired a promotional trailer for 'Monarchy: The Royal Family at Work' that misleadingly edited footage to suggest Queen Elizabeth II had stormed out of a photoshoot with photographer Annie Leibovitz in a huff. In reality, the Queen's seemingly angry comments were made while walking *into* the photoshoot, not leaving it. The sequences were shown out of order. This led to the resignation of BBC1 controller Peter Fincham, the first serving controller of BBC1 to resign in disgrace, along with BBC head of press Jane Fletcher and RDF Media's chief creative officer. How did Martin Bashir secure his 1995 Panorama interview with Princess Diana?Martin Bashir used forged bank statements and other fake documents to deceive Diana's brother, Earl Spencer, into believing that Diana's inner circle was betraying her. The documents falsely claimed her private secretary Patrick Jephson was spying on her for money, her chauffeur was leaking stories to newspapers, and that Prince Charles's secretary had received dubious payments. Bashir also falsely claimed MI5 was following Diana and that nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke had had an affair with Prince Charles resulting in pregnancy and abortion. These deceptions led Earl Spencer to encourage his sister to trust Bashir and give the interview. What were the consequences of the Martin Bashir deception for people around Princess Diana?Several innocent people lost their jobs or had their careers damaged due to Bashir's forged documents. Patrick Jephson, Diana's private secretary of eight years, resigned after his relationship with Diana broke down. Chauffeur Stephen Davies was sacked without explanation. Freelance graphic designer Matt Wiessler, who created the fake documents, was blacklisted by the BBC and his career stalled. Panorama producer Mark Killick was sacked after warning the BBC about Bashir's use of fake documents. Diana herself died in a 1997 car crash without ever learning she had been deceived. What was the outcome of the 2021 Dyson Report regarding the Bashir interview?The Dyson Report, led by senior judge Lord Dyson and published in 2021, found that Martin Bashir had consistently lied and used 'deceitful and deceptive tactics' to gain Diana's trust. It criticized the BBC's original 1996 internal review led by Tony Hall as 'woefully ineffective' and concluded that 'without justification, the BBC fell short of the high standards of integrity and transparency which are its hallmark.' The BBC paid substantial settlements to those wronged, including £750,000 to whistleblower Matt Wiessler, £100,000 to Patrick Jephson (donated to charity), and approximately £1.5 million to the Princess of Wales Memorial Fund from overseas profits of the interview. What was the BBC's role during the 1926 General Strike?During the 1926 General Strike, when newspapers were shut down, the BBC became the sole source of news information. However, under General Manager John Reith, the BBC heavily favored the Conservative government position. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was given a platform to broadcast his plea for strikers to return to work, with Reith even making last-minute adjustments to his speech. Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald and TUC leaders were denied right of reply. The Archbishop of Canterbury's 'peace appeal' was also rejected. Reith later admitted in his diary: 'The government know they can trust us not to be really impartial.' What was the nature of Winston Churchill's feud with the BBC?Winston Churchill's feud with the BBC began around 1926 and lasted decades. Churchill believed he had been 'muzzled' and 'very badly treated' by the BBC for about eleven years, claiming they prevented him from expressing views that 'proved to be right.' While he did make some broadcasts, many of his requests were turned down. However, the article notes this was partly because during his 'wilderness years' of the 1930s, he was a low-key backbencher not considered important enough by his own party or the BBC for regular airtime. Churchill later broke the BBC's television monopoly by passing the 1954 Television Act establishing ITV, which some view as his final revenge. What were the 'Blue Peter' scandals involving deception of viewers?Blue Peter was involved in several deception scandals: (1) In 1962, the original puppy named Petra died of distemper days after her debut, but producers secretly replaced her with a lookalike without telling viewers for 46 years. (2) In 2007, a viewer vote to name a cat resulted in 'Cookie' winning, but editor Richard Marson ignored the result and announced 'Socks' as the winner instead. (3) In 2006, a 'Shoe Biz' UNICEF appeal used a premium-rate phone line where 40,000 children called in, but due to a technical fault, no one could get through. Rather than admit this, a young girl visiting the studio was coached to pretend to be a winning caller, leading to BBC's first £50,000 Ofcom fine. What is President Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC about?In December 2025, President Trump filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit in Miami, Florida against the BBC regarding a 2024 Panorama episode titled 'Trump: A Second Chance?' The lawsuit claims the program misleadingly spliced together clips from Trump's January 2021 speech to suggest he gave a continuous instruction to march to the Capitol and 'fight like hell,' when these remarks were actually about 50 minutes apart. The documentary also cut to footage of supporters marching that was filmed before Trump finished speaking. An internal BBC memo by adviser Michael Prescott later called this 'systematic bias.' The lawsuit alleges intentional defamation with actual malice and violation of Florida trade practices law, seeking $5 billion on each of two counts. How did Margaret Thatcher attempt to influence or change the BBC?Margaret Thatcher clashed repeatedly with the BBC, accusing it of left-wing bias despite data showing more Conservative airtime. She considered allowing viewers to opt out of the TV licence for ITV-only sets, and in 1985 set up the Peacock Committee to examine alternative funding (though it recommended keeping the licence fee). More directly, she stuffed the BBC Board of Governors with staunch Conservatives and loyal Thatcherites, and in 1986 installed Marmaduke Hussey as Chairman. Within three months, Hussey and the Tory-heavy board forced director-general Alasdair Milne to resign immediately or be sacked. Thatcher also frequently criticized BBC journalistic standards and found many programs 'distasteful and offensive.' What did John Reith, the BBC's first General Manager, admit about BBC impartiality?John Reith, the BBC's original General Manager and later first Director-General, made startling admissions about impartiality. During the 1926 General Strike, he conceded in The Radio Times that the BBC was not entirely independent from government and complete impartiality during a national emergency should not be expected. More revealingly, he wrote privately in his diary: 'The government know they can trust us not to be really impartial.' The article notes this was during the British Broadcasting Company period before it became a corporation with a Royal Charter in 1927, when the mission of 'due impartiality' was formally established.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- The BBC has faced accusations of political bias and deceptive editing from powerful figures across the political spectrum throughout its century-long history.\n- A 2025 Panorama documentary misleadingly spliced Trump's January 2021 speech, prompting a $10 billion lawsuit and resignations of two senior BBC executives.\n- Martin Bashir used forged documents to secure Princess Diana's 1995 Panorama interview; the BBC covered up this deception for 25 years before the Dyson Report exposed it.\n- BBC founder John Reith privately admitted the government could trust the BBC not to be truly impartial, particularly during the 1926 General Strike when opposition voices were silenced.\n- Winston Churchill feuded with the BBC for decades, claiming he was muzzled during his wilderness years, though the article suggests he simply wasn't prominent enough for airtime then.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### What was the 'Crowngate' scandal involving the BBC and Queen Elizabeth II?\n\nIn 2007, the BBC aired a promotional trailer for 'Monarchy: The Royal Family at Work' that misleadingly edited footage to suggest Queen Elizabeth II had stormed out of a photoshoot with photographer Annie Leibovitz in a huff. In reality, the Queen's seemingly angry comments were made while walking *into* the photoshoot, not leaving it. The sequences were shown out of order. This led to the resignation of BBC1 controller Peter Fincham, the first serving controller of BBC1 to resign in disgrace, along with BBC head of press Jane Fletcher and RDF Media's chief creative officer.\n\n### How did Martin Bashir secure his 1995 Panorama interview with Princess Diana?\n\nMartin Bashir used forged bank statements and other fake documents to deceive Diana's brother, Earl Spencer, into believing that Diana's inner circle was betraying her. The documents falsely claimed her private secretary Patrick Jephson was spying on her for money, her chauffeur was leaking stories to newspapers, and that Prince Charles's secretary had received dubious payments. Bashir also falsely claimed MI5 was following Diana and that nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke had had an affair with Prince Charles resulting in pregnancy and abortion. These deceptions led Earl Spencer to encourage his sister to trust Bashir and give the interview.\n\n### What were the consequences of the Martin Bashir deception for people around Princess Diana?\n\nSeveral innocent people lost their jobs or had their careers damaged due to Bashir's forged documents. Patrick Jephson, Diana's private secretary of eight years, resigned after his relationship with Diana broke down. Chauffeur Stephen Davies was sacked without explanation. Freelance graphic designer Matt Wiessler, who created the fake documents, was blacklisted by the BBC and his career stalled. Panorama producer Mark Killick was sacked after warning the BBC about Bashir's use of fake documents. Diana herself died in a 1997 car crash without ever learning she had been deceived.\n\n### What was the outcome of the 2021 Dyson Report regarding the Bashir interview?\n\nThe Dyson Report, led by senior judge Lord Dyson and published in 2021, found that Martin Bashir had consistently lied and used 'deceitful and deceptive tactics' to gain Diana's trust. It criticized the BBC's original 1996 internal review led by Tony Hall as 'woefully ineffective' and concluded that 'without justification, the BBC fell short of the high standards of integrity and transparency which are its hallmark.' The BBC paid substantial settlements to those wronged, including £750,000 to whistleblower Matt Wiessler, £100,000 to Patrick Jephson (donated to charity), and approximately £1.5 million to the Princess of Wales Memorial Fund from overseas profits of the interview.\n\n### What was the BBC's role during the 1926 General Strike?\n\nDuring the 1926 General Strike, when newspapers were shut down, the BBC became the sole source of news information. However, under General Manager John Reith, the BBC heavily favored the Conservative government position. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was given a platform to broadcast his plea for strikers to return to work, with Reith even making last-minute adjustments to his speech. Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald and TUC leaders were denied right of reply. The Archbishop of Canterbury's 'peace appeal' was also rejected. Reith later admitted in his diary: 'The government know they can trust us not to be really impartial.'\n\n### What was the nature of Winston Churchill's feud with the BBC?\n\nWinston Churchill's feud with the BBC began around 1926 and lasted decades. Churchill believed he had been 'muzzled' and 'very badly treated' by the BBC for about eleven years, claiming they prevented him from expressing views that 'proved to be right.' While he did make some broadcasts, many of his requests were turned down. However, the article notes this was partly because during his 'wilderness years' of the 1930s, he was a low-key backbencher not considered important enough by his own party or the BBC for regular airtime. Churchill later broke the BBC's television monopoly by passing the 1954 Television Act establishing ITV, which some view as his final revenge.\n\n### What were the 'Blue Peter' scandals involving deception of viewers?\n\nBlue Peter was involved in several deception scandals: (1) In 1962, the original puppy named Petra died of distemper days after her debut, but producers secretly replaced her with a lookalike without telling viewers for 46 years. (2) In 2007, a viewer vote to name a cat resulted in 'Cookie' winning, but editor Richard Marson ignored the result and announced 'Socks' as the winner instead. (3) In 2006, a 'Shoe Biz' UNICEF appeal used a premium-rate phone line where 40,000 children called in, but due to a technical fault, no one could get through. Rather than admit this, a young girl visiting the studio was coached to pretend to be a winning caller, leading to BBC's first £50,000 Ofcom fine.\n\n### What is President Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC about?\n\nIn December 2025, President Trump filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit in Miami, Florida against the BBC regarding a 2024 Panorama episode titled 'Trump: A Second Chance?' The lawsuit claims the program misleadingly spliced together clips from Trump's January 2021 speech to suggest he gave a continuous instruction to march to the Capitol and 'fight like hell,' when these remarks were actually about 50 minutes apart. The documentary also cut to footage of supporters marching that was filmed before Trump finished speaking. An internal BBC memo by adviser Michael Prescott later called this 'systematic bias.' The lawsuit alleges intentional defamation with actual malice and violation of Florida trade practices law, seeking $5 billion on each of two counts.\n\n### How did Margaret Thatcher attempt to influence or change the BBC?\n\nMargaret Thatcher clashed repeatedly with the BBC, accusing it of left-wing bias despite data showing more Conservative airtime. She considered allowing viewers to opt out of the TV licence for ITV-only sets, and in 1985 set up the Peacock Committee to examine alternative funding (though it recommended keeping the licence fee). More directly, she stuffed the BBC Board of Governors with staunch Conservatives and loyal Thatcherites, and in 1986 installed Marmaduke Hussey as Chairman. Within three months, Hussey and the Tory-heavy board forced director-general Alasdair Milne to resign immediately or be sacked. Thatcher also frequently criticized BBC journalistic standards and found many programs 'distasteful and offensive.'\n\n### What did John Reith, the BBC's first General Manager, admit about BBC impartiality?\n\nJohn Reith, the BBC's original General Manager and later first Director-General, made startling admissions about impartiality. During the 1926 General Strike, he conceded in The Radio Times that the BBC was not entirely independent from government and complete impartiality during a national emergency should not be expected. More revealingly, he wrote privately in his diary: 'The government know they can trust us not to be really impartial.' The article notes this was during the British Broadcasting Company period before it became a corporation with a Royal Charter in 1927, when the mission of 'due impartiality' was formally established.\n\n## Sources\n\n- [Original Scandal video: The BBC Has Been Lying to You for 100 Years](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7ND0lT4lyk)\n- [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Hattiesburg_Mississippi_newspaper_front-page_headline.jpeg) by HubCityMan1912 / openverse, by-sa.\n\n## Related Coverage"
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datePublished: 2026-06-26
dateModified: 2026-06-26
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publisher: Scandal
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Back in 2002, the British Broadcasting Corporation conducted a major television survey to determine The Greatest Briton in History. Well over a million viewers voted in the poll, with the crown for The Greatest Ever Briton eventually going to Winston Churchill – the man who led the nation to victory during the Second World War and who was also apparently quite a good amateur bricklayer.

Churchill fought off some stiff and occasionally quite strange competition in the poll, including from the likes of Guy Fawkes, former Sex Pistol John Lydon, the distinctly non-British Bob Geldof, and the entirely fictional King Arthur.

The majority of names on the shortlist of 100 were long dead, including of course the winner. But had Churchill been alive to attend some kind of official ceremony and accept a prestigious prize from the BBC – perhaps a 'Blankety Blank' chequebook and pen – it might have been a fairly muted affair on both sides. You see, Churchill and the BBC didn't really have too much time for each other. In fact, shortly before he became prime minister, Churchill claimed that he had been muzzled by the BBC for years. Some might even say that the supposed Greatest Briton in History was effectively snubbed by the BBC for well over a decade, and his requests to participate in broadcasts were routinely turned down. Winston Churchill had been embroiled in a long-running feud with the BBC since around 1926, and it could be argued that he ultimately had the last laugh against the corporation, but he had a long wait until 1958 for that satisfying moment.

This was hardly a one-off situation, though. The poor old BBC has been fending off hostile attacks from some of the most influential figures in history ever since the company's inception in 1922. Fast-forward to 1990, and the former Chairman of the Conservative government, Norman Tebbit, is describing the BBC as the home of "The insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of third-rate minds." Fast-forward even further to 2025 and we've reached a frankly bizarre situation in which the President of the United States of America is suing the BBC for defamation, whilst his press secretary Karoline Leavitt is publicly observing that British taxpayers are being "Forced to foot the bill for a leftist propaganda machine."

Over the course of the last century, the supposedly impartial and trustworthy BBC has frequently been accused of political bias, deliberately misleading viewers, and resorting to devious practices which, in one significant case, is alleged to have contributed to the death of a member of the Royal family. Even the long-running children's show 'Blue Peter' has been lying to our children since about 1962.

Perhaps the deception and dishonesty can be traced right back to the very foundations on which the BBC was built. The company was barely four years old when the original General Manager, John Reith – a man who apparently admired Hitler – privately admitted in his diary that the government could trust the BBC to not really be impartial at all. Whilst the corporation appears to be constantly having to defend itself these days from the latest controversy or scandal, it appears that this was always the case right from the very beginning and that nothing much has changed.

But just how much can we truly trust the BBC? Is it more than a little unfair to be so aggressively critical of a corporation which has served the public over the last century under very challenging conditions and whilst under such constant scrutiny and scorn? Or is it finally time to scrap that outdated TV licence fee, and banish the deceitful British Broadcasting Corporation to the archives once and for all?

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## The Queen's Nose

The BBC has certainly made a long list of high-profile enemies over the years, including Jeremy Clarkson, Gregg Wallace, Liz Truss, the Scottish National Party, and Sir Cliff Richard. But in terms of pissing off figures in positions of power and influence, we think we can go one better than even Sir Cliff Richard. You know you might have a bit of a battle on your hands when the most powerful man in the world has filed a $10 billion lawsuit against you.

Perhaps not everyone was taking President Trump entirely seriously when he first threatened to sue the BBC. Even his most devoted followers must admit that he has a tendency to change his mind, not follow up on his threats, or completely contradict what he was saying a few days earlier. At the time of writing this script, Trump has just described the UK soldiers who fought alongside the U.S in Afghanistan as the "greatest of warriors", just a couple of days after suggesting that the UK forces held back from the frontline to drink cups of tea and leave all the dirty work to the U.S military. In a sense, he's kind of like that drunk bloke in the pub who randomly ricochets between telling you that you're his best mate and threatening to smash your face in.

But in this case, Trump was true to his word, filing a lawsuit in Miami, Florida against the BBC in December 2025 which seeks $5 billion each on two counts relating to an episode of 'Panorama' first broadcast by the BBC just a few days before the 2024 Presidential Election.

The episode entitled 'Trump: A Second Chance?' included three short clips from the lengthy speech made by Trump to his supporters in January 2021 shortly after it became clear that he'd just lost the previous election to Joe Biden – although of course the man who never admits defeat didn't quite see it that way. In the version we see presented in 'Panorama', Trump says: "We're going to walk down to the Capitol…and I'll be there with you. And we fight! We fight like hell!"

This could be interpreted as a direct call to his supporters to march on the Capitol and take matters into their own hands. It also sounds as if he'll be joining in the fight himself, although he doesn't make it clear if he'll be fighting on the frontline or hanging around at the back like a British soldier. The problem is that the documentary fails to make it clear that Trump didn't come out with all those words in the same breath. The last bit about fighting like hell came about fifty minutes after the first bit about walking down to the Capitol. In-between those remarks, Trump had suggested that the purpose of the nice little stroll to the Capitol was to "cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women" and to make "peaceful and patriotic protests."

A further complication is that after splicing together the comments, the documentary then cuts immediately to scenes of angry Trump supporters marching on the Capitol as if they have been directly inspired by Trump's violent call to action, when in fact some of this footage was filmed before Trump had even finished speaking.

Now it can't be forgotten that an angry mob of supporters did indeed attack the Capitol during and after a speech made by Trump in which he falsely claimed that the election results had been rigged. But it didn't happen in the way depicted in the BBC's 'Panorama' programme. And whilst it would have been perfectly legitimate for the BBC to show a few edited highlights of such a long, rambling speech, this should have been made clear instead of giving the misleading impression that Trump had given a single and continuous instruction to walk down to the Capitol and fight like hell.

It took quite a while for people to get angry about it, though. When this edition of 'Panorama' was first broadcast in late 2024, nobody appeared too bothered about the dodgy edit. In fact, nobody seemed to care for the best part of a year. This wasn't even the first time that the BBC had played this kind of trick with the Trump speech. A 2022 edition of 'Newsnight' had also spliced together segments of the speech to give a similar misleading impression without alerting viewers to the edit. But again, nobody cared.

The first time that anyone really began to sit up and take notice was when an internal BBC memo conveying concerns over the 'Panorama' edit was leaked to the press in late 2025. The memo had been composed earlier in the year by the BBC Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee adviser Michael Prescott who pointed out that the misleading edits in the Panorama programme created a distortion of the day's events and were an example of systematic bias reflected by the BBC. It was this leaked memo which caused the heavily belated storm that eventually brought the matter to the attention of President Trump, although he did appear to be a bit confused over what exactly was the problem. At one point, he told reporters at the Oval Office that he felt obliged to sue the corporation because: "Literally, they put words in my mouth. They had me saying things that I never said coming out. I guess they used AI or something."

Literally, that's not what happened at all, and it makes you wonder if he ever received a proper briefing. Alternatively, perhaps he never made that false claim at all, and we were all just watching footage spliced together by the BBC from separate sentences that were uttered seven years apart.

Trump was now demanding an apology and substantial compensation from the BBC who were certainly very quick to apologise after acknowledging that they had made an error of judgement. And there were a couple of swift high-level casualties from the fallout. The director-general of the BBC, Tim Davie, resigned from his post, alongside the CEO of BBC News, Deborah Turness. But the corporation didn't believe that Trump had a basis for a defamation claim.

Trump obviously disagreed and has filed a lawsuit which claims that the Panorama edit was a "brazen attempt to interfere in and influence the 2024 Election's outcome to President Trump's detriment." The first $5 billion count alleges that the edit of the speech defamed Trump "intentionally" and "with actual malice" whilst the second $5 billion count alleges that the deceptive broadcast was a violation of trade practices law in Florida where it was argued that the episode of Panorama was available to watch.

It's just interesting to ponder that this whole controversy which took out two senior BBC executives in a single blow wasn't sparked by outrage from viewers or Trump supporters. The edit was ignored for a year and would have remained forgotten had it not been for that single internal memo written by Michael Prescott – a memo which now could potentially cost the BBC a cool $10 billion. Or could it?

Well, hold that thought as we'll return to the topic of the most likely outcome in either five or fifty minutes, depending on how deceptively this video was edited. But this wasn't the only time that a dodgy edit involving a high-profile figure landed the BBC in hot water. One incident from 2007 led to the only time in the history of the corporation when the serving controller of BBC1 resigned from his position in disgrace. And yet it all might seem so surprisingly tame and faintly bewildering when we start saying it out loud.

The BBC had commissioned a company called RDF Media to produce a series entitled 'Monarchy: The Royal Family at Work.' The production team were granted exclusive access to the Royal family's inner circle for a whole year, following around Queen Elizabeth II as she prepares for state visits, oversees the impending celebrations for her 80th birthday, attends lavish dinner parties, and secretly confesses that she is a devil-worshipping Russian spy. No, hang on, that last bit isn't true, there was nothing quite as controversial as that to crop up in the series. In fact, there was nothing controversial at all about the series itself. The problem was with the 60-second trailer which was shown during an Autumn press launch for the BBC's upcoming new shows.

The trailer includes a segment in which the Queen is dressed up in full Royal clobber whilst taking part in a photoshoot. The American portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz makes a suggestion to the Queen that she might try removing the crown to make the whole scene look "less dressy." The Queen seems to think that Annie Leibovitz might not fully grasp the levels of pomp and grandeur that these photoshoots are meant to embody. With a twinkle in her eye, she responds: "Less dressy? What do you think this is?" However, the twinkle appears to have disappeared a couple of seconds later when the Queen is then seen marching out of the photoshoot, grumpily telling one of her aides: "I'm not changing anything! I've done enough dressing like this!"

The BBC1 controller Peter Fincham was present at the launch and was clearly quite excited about this exclusive insight into the life of the Queen. Just before the trailer was shown, he told the reporters that they were about to see a sneak peek of "a memorable moment" in which the Queen "loses it a bit" and "walks out in a huff."

What Fincham didn't know is that this isn't really how things went down. And this wasn't just a case of skipping through a few boring bits, it was more a case of presenting the events in the wrong order. The Queen's huffy comments to her aide were made as she was walking into the photoshoot, before she playfully teased the photographer over the "less dressy" suggestion. So she didn't storm out of the photoshoot as implied by the trailer, it was more a case of storming *into* the photoshoot.

The BBC had not been made aware that the sequences in the trailer were out of order. RDF Media provided the material for the trailer, and later on they couldn't quite make up their minds about whether it was perfectly normal to show "taster" material out of sequence, or whether they had been just deliberately trying to spice things up a bit.

Following the press launch, Peter Fincham was informed by RDF Media for the first time that there might just have been a right royal cock-up with the editing of the launch tape. He contacted Buckingham Palace officials to apologise, and they jointly agreed to hold off making any kind of public statement until the following day so that they could "check the temperature of the story." We guess the hope here was that the story might not generate too much fuss, but the next day's newspapers had other ideas. The press was running rampant with reports that our miserable old Queen had flounced out of a photoshoot after refusing to take off her crown.

The BBC put the record straight with a public apology which explained that the material on the launch tape had been supplied to them in error. Peter Fincham took responsibility for the "regrettable human error" but initially insisted that he had no intention of resigning over the matter. It was a different story when the results of an internal BBC investigation were published just a few months later. Whilst the report found that nobody at the BBC had ever consciously set out to defame or misrepresent the Queen, it still concluded that "The incident revealed misjudgements, poor practice and ineffective systems as well, of course, as the usual helping of bad luck that often accompanies such sorry cases." Peter Fincham became the only controller of BBC1 to step down in the wake of a scandal, and he wasn't the only casualty. The BBC's head of press Jane Fletcher also resigned, as did the chief creative officer of RDF Media.

The saga since dubbed 'Crowngate' may have taken down some notable figures, but some critics have pondered over whether this was all just a bit of an over-the-top reaction to a relatively trivial matter. We're hardly talking about inciting an insurrection here. We're talking about a woman who sounded a bit grumpy on her way into a photoshoot rather than on her way out. Whilst it could be argued that the BBC1 controller should have been a bit more aware of the content he was confidently hawking to the press, his shamed resignation feels like a bit of a harsh outcome. If the woman in question had been anyone other than the Queen, it feels likely that nobody would have batted an eyelid over a couple of sequences in a promotional trailer getting shown out of order.

We've no idea if the Queen herself was remotely bothered when she heard about the trailer, or if she stormed out of Buckingham Palace wielding an axe and heading in the general direction of Wood Lane. But it makes you wonder what would happen if the BBC ever did anything really bad to properly wind up members of the Royal family. Except, as we'll discover after our brief sojourn into children's programming, we already know the answer to that one…

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<!-- aeo:section start="the-secret-life-of-dogs" -->
## The Secret Life of Dogs

Two incidents usually come to mind when discussing 'Blue Peter' – the world's longest running children's TV show which has been in regular production since 1958. The first is that time in 1969 when they paraded a cute baby elephant called Lulu around the studio and she proceeded to urinate and defecate all over the floor before dragging the handler off camera. The second is that time in 1998 when the presenter Richard Bacon was fired after it was revealed by the press that he had taken cocaine in a London nightclub. So that's about 67 years of broadcasting encapsulated by a presenter taking cocaine and a shitting baby elephant.

The cocaine incident didn't seem to do much harm to Richard Bacon's career in the long term. He's probably done a lot better than most Blue Peter presenters. But he did receive a firm public ticking off from the Head of Children's BBC, Lorraine Heggessey, when she addressed the young viewers in a short statement broadcast before the first episode of 'Blue Peter' to follow the sacking. She explained that Richard Bacon had been very naughty indeed and that he wouldn't be returning to the show after he'd admitted to taking an illegal drug. She pointed out that Bacon had not only let down himself and the whole team of Blue Peter, but he'd also let down all the viewers very badly. Quite right, too. You would never have caught Peter Purves or Valerie Singleton snorting coke down a nightclub.

But maybe the BBC should make absolutely sure that they have their own house in order before chucking one of their presenters under a bus. Blue Peter itself wasn't averse to cooking up the occasional scandalous incident over its long history. Here's one they made earlier.

It could be said that some of the most familiar faces from Blue Peter belonged to dogs rather than the human presenters. Depending on what decade you were watching the show, you might remember the name of the incumbent Blue Peter dog as either Shep, Goldie, Bonnie, or Mabel. But if you've got a really long memory, you might remember Petra, the original Blue Peter dog.

Petra was still a tiny un-named eight-week-old puppy when she was first introduced to Blue Peter viewers near the Christmas of 1962. She acquired her name from a viewer's vote a week later and would go on to become the longest-serving Blue Peter dog, appearing on the show right up until her death at the grand old age of 15 in 1977. A bronze bust of the reportedly irritable and bad-tempered mongrel still stands today in the Blue Peter garden.

But it wasn't until 2008 that the show's editor of 23 years, Biddie Baxter, revealed that deception had been at work right near the very beginning, albeit under very sad circumstances. The eight-week-old puppy first introduced in 1962 had died from distemper just a couple of days after her TV debut. This left the production team in a quandary as the viewers were meant to be voting on the puppy's name. But rather than reveal the true fate of the original Petra, Biddy Baxter and a BBC producer trawled the pet shops of London until they eventually happened to find another lookalike puppy, shivering alone in the corner of a pen, that might just pass for a double. Not a single viewer noticed the switch, and the secret was safe for 46 years.

Of course, it's perfectly understandable why the producers wanted to avoid upsetting the young viewers by telling them that a cute puppy had died. If nothing else, it might have dramatically changed the outcome of the viewer's vote. But rather less forgivable was what happened much later in 2007 in another incident relating to a viewer's vote to name a new Blue Peter pet.

In this case, it was a Blue Peter cat that would go on to be known as Socks. When the kitten was first introduced on the show, viewers were invited to vote for their favourite name via an online poll, and the result was announced a week later. Thankfully, this story doesn't involve a dead animal, as the same kitten definitely survived to hear the result. But it wasn't the right result. The young viewers had conclusively voted that they wanted to name the new cat 'Cookie'. Yet for reasons known only to himself, the serving Blue Peter editor, Richard Marson, decided that he didn't like it, and the decision was taken to completely ignore the genuine poll results and make out that the winning name had been 'Socks'.

The truth was soon sussed out by the press who accused the BBC of breaching the trust of the young audience by fabricating the results of polls. Long-running presenter Konnie Huq was part of the team offering a humble apology to viewers as they admitted that the original cat had been given the wrong name, and she sheepishly declared that they were making amends with the introduction of another new Blue Peter cat which would definitely be called Cookie.

This now makes us wonder if we could really trust the results of that 2002 BBC poll for the Greatest Briton in History. Did Winston really win that vote? Or could the genuine winner have been Noel Edmonds? We'll never know for sure.

But Blue Peter had actually been going through a pretty mischievous and dishonest phase in general around this time. Less than a year earlier, they'd been involved in a more serious slice of deception, and again it was poor old Konnie Huq who was shoved in front of the cameras to apologise, despite having nothing to do with the controversy.

The show is believed to have raised over £100 million over the years for charitable causes, and it was during an annual appeal for UNICEF in late 2006 that the BBC ended up copping for its first ever fine from Ofcom. The "Shoe Biz" appeal encouraged the viewers to phone a premium-rate phone line to be in with a chance of getting through to the live show and winning big prizes by correctly guessing the mystery celebrity owners of pairs of shoes.

There was already a little bit of controversy with regard to the idea of encouraging children to phone premium-rate telephone numbers. Yes, all the proceeds went to charity and the presenters urged viewers to get permission from their parents before racking up a fortune on the phone bill, but you wonder how many kids strictly followed this advice in their rush to get through to Blue Peter to win games and toys.

Around 40,000 children were reported to have phoned in, but it turned out that not one of them had a chance of winning due to a technical fault on the day which prevented callers from getting through to the studio. At this point it might have been wise to come clean and inform the viewers that the whole phone-in had gone a bit pear-shaped, but a member of the production team had another idea: A young girl was visiting the studio at the time, and it was decided that she should pretend to be the winning caller from the other end of the studio. She was given a quick coaching session beforehand and told exactly what to say, whilst the presenters in the studio were left in the dark and under the impression that they were talking to a genuine winner on an external line. The show's editor, Richard Marson, was apparently also unaware of what was going on here, but it was reported that he later commended the member of the production team for using their initiative. Ofcom wasn't quite so impressed with the blatant deception, and they fined the BBC for the very first time, to the tune of £50,000.

Konnie Huq was again wheeled out to issue the official apology which echoed the sentiments of Lorraine Heggessey's 1998 statement on Richard Bacon but this time making it clear that it was Blue Peter itself that had let the viewers down. Editor Richard Marson kept hold of his job after this one but not for very long. Perhaps surprisingly, it was the subsequent scandal involving the naming of the Blue Peter cat that appeared to bring him down. One inside source told the press: "I think the feeling was that if we can't honestly name a Blue Peter cat, then really, that is perhaps the last straw in this whole fiasco." Neither Socks nor Cookie were available for comment, but we assume that they had both felt very let down by the programme.

One positive aspect of the more recent Blue Peter controversies is that the truth emerged very quickly, unlike the 46-year wait to discover the fate of the original Petra. But there was another pretty long wait – of around 25 years – before we learned the whole story of a much bigger BBC scandal involving a member of the Royal family. And for once, we're not talking about the man formerly known as Prince Andrew.

This incident relates to another episode of President Trump's favourite BBC show 'Panorama'. The BBC's flagship current-affairs series is the longest-running news magazine programme in the world and has been knocking around since 1953, but it was stoking up occasional controversies long before it was upsetting U.S presidents. And one of the biggest scandals of all relates to an episode broadcast in November 1995 which consisted of a rare and exclusive in-depth interview with Diana, Princess of Wales.

By this point, Diana and Prince Charles had been separated for just under three years, although there was no sign yet of a divorce on the horizon. Rumours had been swirling around since the 1980s that Prince Charles was embroiled in an affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles, and evidence of this had finally come to light in the early 1990s. The BBC journalist Martin Bashir had now scored a major scoop by persuading Diana to participate in a warts-and-all 'Panorama' interview and reveal her side of the story.

A worldwide audience of over 200 million tuned in to hear The People's Princess talk candidly of how the marriage always felt a bit crowded as there were three people in the relationship. She also spoke of her own affair with James Hewitt, and revealed how she had been struggling with eating disorders and self-harming. The actual broadcast wasn't quite full-on warts-and-all, as an editorial decision was taken to remove some of Diana's derogatory comments about the Queen Mother. The BBC felt that it would reflect badly on the princess if she was heard dissing such a beloved and frail figure who was expected to pop her clogs at any minute, although as it panned out, the Queen Mother had another six years left on the clock.

The rest of the Royal family weren't exactly thrilled with a broadcast that had taken them quite by surprise. The Queen's response was to write to both Charles and Diana, insisting that they crack on with getting divorced. It may also have cost the BBC a long-running Christmas present. Ever since 1932, the serving monarch had delivered a message to the nation on Christmas Day which was exclusively produced and broadcast by the BBC. However, this deal was lost in 1996 when it was announced that ITV would be allowed to produce The Royal Message every other year whilst it would be broadcast simultaneously on both channels. The official line from Buckingham Palace was that this new arrangement reflected the composition of the modern television and radio industries. But cynics pointed out that it was a massive coincidence how this decision had been taken so quickly after the unwelcome broadcast of the Diana interview, almost as if the Royal Family were seeking vengeance on the BBC for giving Diana a platform without their approval.

So, it's true to say that the shocking interview ruffled more than a few feathers on the way to becoming the most-watched episode of 'Panorama' by quite some distance over the programme's 73-year history. But hang on, just how did Martin Bashir persuade Diana to bare her soul to the world?

Well, firstly he approached her brother, Earl Spencer, armed with a fistful of bank statements, receipts, and other documents which proved that Diana should be very careful about who she trusts. The documents revealed that Diana's private secretary Patrick Jephson was accepting large sums of money to spy on his boss, whilst Charles's private secretary Richard Aylard had also been receiving substantial payments from some very dubious sources in the Channel Islands.

Earl Spencer was advised that his sister should find another chauffeur, as her current one, Stephen Davies, was feeding the now-defunct 'Today' newspaper with stories. He was also shown bank statements which proved that his own former security guard, Alan Waller, had been taking suspicious payments from the UK press. And for an encore, he was told that Diana was being closely followed by MI5, and that the nanny of her children, Tiggy Legge-Bourke, had earlier been involved in an affair with her husband which had led to a pregnancy. Martin Bashir even had the receipts for the abortion clinic that Tiggy subsequently attended.

The whole idea seemed to be to persuade Earl Spencer that Martin Bashir was the man in the know, the man who could weed out the rogues in the inner circle and protect her from the press, and perhaps even the only man who Diana should be talking to in a major new television interview. The strategy worked; Within weeks of Bashir's first bombshell meeting with Earl Spencer, he had secured an interview with the Princess of Wales for 'Panorama'.

However, Earl Spencer quickly became suspicious that he may have been deceived by Bashir in a plot to get an interview with the most famous woman in the world. And his suspicions grew when he found that what Bashir was now saying to his sister didn't always tally with what Bashir had been saying earlier. For example, Bashir was explaining to Diana that she was being followed by MI6 whereas he'd previously told Earl Spencer that she was being followed by MI5. In short, Spencer was beginning to sense that Martin Bashir was behaving in a way that could be described as a bit shifty.

And he had good reason to be suspicious. All the documents supplied by Bashir did indeed prove that Diana should be very careful about who she trusts, but this should have started with Martin Bashir himself. None of the allegations made by Bashir were true, and the documents were all fakes, mocked up by a freelance graphic designer on the instructions of Bashir.

However, the truth wouldn't be revealed in full for another 25 years, and in the meantime this deception led to some pretty serious and upsetting consequences. Diana's private secretary of eight years, Patrick Jephsen, resigned after finding that his relationship with Diana had suddenly broken down, although he had no idea why and wouldn't discover for another couple of decades how Bashir had effectively poisoned the relationship. Diane's chauffeur, Stephen Davies, was swiftly sacked from his job with no explanation. And less than two years after the broadcast, the Princess of Wales would be killed in a car crash without ever knowing that they had never betrayed her at all.

The freelance graphic designer who had mocked up the documents, Matt Wiessler, approached the BBC shortly after the broadcast because he had begun to feel uncomfortable about what Bashir had asked him to do. He was largely ignored and his career stalled as he was never invited to work for the BBC again. On a similar note, a senior producer on 'Panorama', Mark Killick, warned the BBC that Bashir appeared to have been using fake documentation to lure a member of the Royal family into giving an interview. The BBC felt that Killick was simply jealous of Bashir's incredible scoop, and promptly sacked him.

In fact, the BBC only began to reluctantly plod into half-hearted action after designer Matt Wiessler approached 'The Mail on Sunday' with the documents that he had forged, spawning the briefly sensational headline: "DIANA'S BBC MAN AND FAKE BANK STATEMENTS!"

An internal review was conducted in 1996, led by Tony Hall who was then the Head of News and Current Affairs, and would go on to become the future BBC director-general. But they may as well not have bothered. Key figures such as Matt Wiessler and Earl Spencer were not interviewed as part of the process. Instead, the BBC appeared to just put their faith in Martin Bashir who admitted to commissioning the false documents but insisted that he never showed anything like that to Diana, and they played no part in securing the interview. It was an odd defence because nobody had ever suggested that the forged documents had been shown to Diana. The whole point was that Bashir had been grooming Earl Spencer with these forgeries so that Spencer would pass on the information to his sister and pretty much secure the interview. Maybe Bashir was trying to imply that it wasn't his fault if Earl Spencer believed his lies and shared them with Diana.

But it didn't seem to matter either way. Despite Bashir admitting that he had been spending his time forging documents relating to the employees of the Princess of Wales, Tony Hall's internal review completely cleared him of any wrongdoing, even going so far as to describe him as "an honest and honourable man." And that's how things were left for around fifteen years.

Bashir's faked documents may have lost quite a few people their jobs through no fault of their own, but he himself went on to enjoy a pretty lucrative career. He courted controversy again in 2003 with the documentary 'Living with Michael Jackson', although again this had no impact on his career. Bashir had spent eight months filming with Jackson, during which time the journalist was constantly singing his praises, admiring his skills as a father, and generally sucking up to The King of Pop big time. However, the subsequent documentary featured sneering narration from Bashir which painted Jackson in a negative light and poured suspicion over his relationships with young children. Jackson described the documentary as a "betrayal" and later revealed that he had only agreed to participate after Bashir had smugly described himself as "The man who turned Diana's life around."

Bashir later moved to the States for twelve years where he worked as a news anchor and correspondent for the likes of ABC and NBC, before returning to the UK in 2016 where he was welcomed back with open arms by the BBC who appointed him as their Religious Editor. But the BBC finally lost their faith in this honest and honourable man when the long-delayed shit finally hit the fan in 2020.

The former BBC journalist Andy Webb had been brewing suspicions for years over the Diana documentary, and he was putting together his own documentary on the topic for Channel 4 when he obtained a stack of internal BBC memos obtained via a Freedom of Information request. The memos dating back to the 1996 internal review suggested that Earl Spencer had not been deceived by fake documents but had instead willingly provided Bashir with genuine confidential documents. Earl Spencer had been silent on the whole matter until now, but he was boiling over with fury when Adam Webb shared these memos with him, and he now felt obliged to publicly reveal the full details of Bashir's shifty behaviour.

The BBC was quick to offer an apology but Spencer demanded a full independent inquiry and that's exactly what he got. Martin Bashir himself wasn't particularly helpful in this new inquiry led by the senior judge Lord Dyson. The year was 2020 and he was apparently seriously ill with the aftereffects of COVID-19 and so was unable to offer his full co-operation. The Daily Mirror was quick to publish new photographs of Bashir which suggested that his supposedly serious health condition wasn't preventing him from picking up an order from the local takeaway. We're surprised he didn't just get it delivered by Uber.

Bashir was also healthy enough to engage in an email discussion with the BBC Head of History in which he offered a pretty lame defence. He wrote: "I am sorry to hear that this so-called 'forgery' story has reared its head again. It played no part in the interview but did allow professional jealousy, particularly within the corporation, to hang its hat on alleged wrongdoing. At the time, it was also apparent that there was some irritation that a second-generation immigrant of non-white, working-class roots should have the temerity to enter a Royal Palace and conduct an interview. It would have been so much easier if one of the dynastic families (Dimbleby et al) had done it!"

This does seem to be missing the point somewhat. It was Bashir's behaviour, not his roots, that were under scrutiny. And we suspect that neither of the Dimbleby brothers would ever have resorted to forging fake documents, peddling lies, destroying relationships, and getting people fired in order to secure a scoop.

Bashir had already stepped down from his role as Religious Editor on health grounds by the time the results of the Dyson Report were published in 2021, and it pulled no punches. Lord Dyson found that Martin Bashir had consistently lied over his reprehensible behaviour to gain the trust of Diana by using deceitful and deceptive tactics. The report also criticised Tony Hall's original 1996 internal review, describing it as "woefully ineffective" and concluding that "Without justification, the BBC fell short of the high standards of integrity and transparency which are its hallmark."

Lord Michael Grade, a former BBC1 controller and chairman, felt that the BBC had deliberately covered up the truth, and that their behaviour was even worse than Bashir's. He ranted: "It's taken 25 years to get the truth. It raises the question in your mind; how many more cover-ups are there in the files of BBC journalism that we haven't been told about?"

Of course, the fact that it took 25 years meant that there was little subsequent accountability from those involved in the original botched internal enquiry as just about everybody had moved on since then. Tony Hall went on to become Baron Hall of Birkenhead and was the director-general of the BBC for seven years between 2013 and 2020. In the aftermath of the Dyson Report, he admitted that he had been wrong to give Bashir "the benefit of the doubt" but the only fresh inconvenience he endured was his resignation as chairman of the board of The National Gallery, a post he relinquished on the grounds that his continued presence on the board was a "distraction." Tim Suter, another former BBC executive who played a central role in the 1996 inquiry, also stepped down from his current role on the board of Ofcom. Suter had actually been one of the founding partners of Ofcom in 2003 but stepped down by mutual agreement in the wake of the damning Dyson report.

Aside from that, it was the contemporary version of the BBC that paid the price for the 25-year-old scandal, and they had to dig pretty deep into their pockets when it came to paying out substantial payments to all those who had been wronged by Bashir's actions and the subsequent failed internal inquiry. We're not quite talking in the same league as the $10 billion sought by President Trump, but even so, it wasn't a cheap round for the BBC. Settlements ranging from a reported £20,000 to £750,000 were paid out separately to the sacked chauffeur Stephen Davies, Earl Spencer's security guard Allan Waller, the nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke, and Diana's private secretary, Patrick Jephsen, who was paid a reported £100,000 which he donated to charity. The highest settlements were believed to have been paid out to the ignored and sacked whistleblower producer Mark Killick, and the ignored and blacklisted whistleblower designer Matt Wiessler. Whilst details are vague relating to Mark Killick, it's reported that Matt Weissler was given £750,000.

On top of this, the BBC also donated around £1.5 million to the Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, and this came from the profits that the overseas sales of the original Panorama interview had generated. But as for the other costly settlements…well, if you paid your TV licence in recent years, then you helped to pay the bill for sorting out the mess that the BBC had made 25 years earlier. We're sure that news will give you a warm glow of pleasure.

The relatives of Diana were hardly feeling warm glows of pleasure towards the BBC after the publication of the Dyson Report, and her children certainly had a lot to say. Prince William released a statement in May 2021 in which he said of his mother: "It brings indescribable sadness to know that the BBC's failures contributed significantly to her fear, paranoia and isolation that I remember from those final years with her. But what saddens me most, is that if the BBC had properly investigated the complaints and concerns first raised in 1995, my mother would have known that she had been deceived. She was failed not just by a rogue reporter, but by leaders at the BBC who looked the other way rather than asking the tough questions."

Prince Harry went further in his own statement released on the same day in which he implied that this kind of behaviour had contributed in some way to his mother's death. He said: "The ripple effect of a culture of exploitation and unethical practices ultimately took her life. What deeply concerns me is that practices like these—and even worse—are still widespread today. Then, and now, it's bigger than one outlet, one network, or one publication. Our mother lost her life because of this, and nothing has changed."

Earl Spencer has been rather more blunt in his comments in which he draws a direct parallel between the Bashir interview and Diana's death. He feels that Bashir's lies led to Diana losing trust in the key people around her, leaving her without adequate protection. And he still feels that not everyone involved has been held accountable. As recently as November 2025, he said: "There are high-ranking people in the BBC who participated in securing this interview, through appalling deception. I am sure that this led directly to Diana being left vulnerable in Paris on the night she died."

At the other end of the argument, there are those who feel that whilst the actions of Martin Bashir and the BBC were unforgivable, we shouldn't be getting carried away and blowing things out of proportion. Biographer Andrew Morton believes that Diana was ready to speak her mind at the time, and there's an argument that she would have said broadly the same things in an interview whether she was speaking to Martin Bashir or not. It's not as if she spent the interview discussing betrayal from her employees or being spied on by intelligence services. She was there to talk about her health struggles and her marriage. The interview may have panned out in exactly the same way with or without faked bank statements. Bashir now says that he deeply regrets his "stupid" actions but maintains that Diana had complete control of the actual interview and that the broadcast did not harm her in any way. Even the Dyson Report conceded that if forged documents had not been involved, Diana would probably still have agreed to the interview with Bashir.

And then we have the word of Diana herself. During the original internal review, she had provided a genuine handwritten note for the BBC which read: "Martin Bashir did not show me any documents nor give me any information that I was not previously aware of. I consented to the interview on Panorama without any undue pressure and have NO regrets."

So it's a complicated pickle, but it's still worth emphasizing that Diana did seem to be getting indirectly fed with false information from Bashir that shattered her trust in those around her and cost the jobs of a bunch of loyal people who had done nothing wrong.

Several cabinet members of the serving Conservative government, including Prime Minister Boris Johnson, expressed their disdain and concern over how the BBC had handled this mess. Home Secretary Priti Patel talked of looking at new ways of governing the BBC and refused to rule out criminal prosecutions on this matter, although things have fallen pretty quiet on that front since then.

Mind you, the serving Conservative government had consistently clashed with the BBC before and after the revelations from the Dyson Report. Come to think of it, just about every serving government and opposition party has consistently clashed with the BBC over the last century. The arguments and public spats covered a variety of topics but more often than not, it usually boiled down to that age-old matter of "due impartiality" and perceived political bias.

The official mission statement of the British Broadcasting Corporation, as outlined in its current Royal Charter is: "To act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality, and distinctive output and services which inform, educate, and entertain."

But how many times over the years has it broken that promise of impartiality, and is it even a promise that is remotely possible to keep? To explore the answer to that one, we should delve much deeper back into history to unravel a comical long-running feud with Winston Churchill, and the very beginnings of the Beeb when it appeared to be firmly in the pockets of the UK government and barely even pretending to be impartial. Could it be true that the BBC was founded on a stinking lie?

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<!-- aeo:section start="the-thick-of-it" -->
## The Thick of It

The BBC had faced hostile opponents even before it was launched as a radio broadcasting company way back in 1922. These were the days before the BBC was even a corporation with a Royal Charter. Instead, the British Broadcasting Company as it was then known, was a monopoly operation jointly owned by a consortium of six leading manufacturers of wireless radios. The whole point of the business was to shift more radio sets with the launch of a new broadcasting service which would be largely funded by the fresh profits.

The British press naturally wasn't so taken with the idea and viewed this new-fangled radio service as a threat to their business model. Why would anybody want to buy a newspaper featuring yesterday's news when listeners could tune into real-time news bulletins? The Press Association initially argued that the BBC shouldn't be allowed to run news bulletins at all, but a compromise was eventually reached in which the radio service could only broadcast bulletins after 7pm, and even then it could only use existing copyrighted material from news agencies rather than employing their own journalists.

The BBC also faced heavy restrictions on sport reports, leading to a memorably farcical live broadcast in 1926 from the Epsom Derby in which they weren't allowed to describe what was going on in the race or who had won, but instead just tried to convey the atmosphere of the occasion with cheering crowds and stomping hooves.

But it was that very same year that the new broadcaster stumbled into what might be described as a pivotal moment in its history – and that was the General Strike of 1926. In the face of shrinking profits in the UK's coal mining industry, over a million miners were now being expected to work longer hours in poorer conditions for significantly less money. In an attempt to compel the Conservative government to intervene, the General Council of the Trades Union Congress called a General Strike which came into effect on the 4th of May.

Over one and a half million workers from various industries supported this gesture of sympathy for the miners, causing massive disruption right across the nation. The strikers included transport workers, dockers, construction workers, and crucially it also impacted the printing presses which meant that most of the UK newspapers ground to a temporary halt and were unable to report on this major ongoing story. With newspapers out of the picture, this left the BBC as the only reliable source of information on the strike, and for the first time it was allowed to broadcast regular news bulletins throughout the day. But how exactly was the BBC going to cope with this new burden of responsibility and how was this independent broadcaster going to fairly convey both sides of the argument?

Well, that was a decision for the original BBC General Manager, John Reith. It's quite remarkable how this 6 foot 6 Scottish engineer managed to land the job, considering that he didn't have that much experience in management, and that he later admitted he knew nothing at all about broadcasting and couldn't even comprehend some of the questions thrown to him during the interview. We can only assume that not many others applied for the post.

Now, Reith himself was against the General Strike and very much in agreement with the serving Prime Minister of the Conservative government, Stanley Baldwin, who felt that the General Strike was an attack on constitutional government, a challenge to parliament, and was putting the UK on the path to anarchy and ruin. There are of course two sides to every argument and we won't dive too far into the detail here. It's worth pointing out that the owners of the coal mines weren't just trying to annoy their own workforce out of spite. Following the First World War, the British coal mining industry entered a prolonged period of decline for a variety of reasons and difficult decisions had to be made. At the same time, these wealthy mine owners probably weren't facing too many hardships themselves as they increased the hours and slashed the wages of their employees.

Whilst John Reith may have formed his own opinions, he was still keen for the independent BBC to broadcast arguments from both sides of the conflict – those who believed firmly that all the strikers should get back to work and restore normality to Britain, and those who believed that the strike should only end with a triumphant result for the overworked and underpaid miners. However, the Prime Minister had other ideas.

Stanley Baldwin was invited to make a broadcast to the nation from John Reith's own home, in which he made an impassioned plea for strikers to return to work. On Baldwin's request, Reith made several adjustments to the draft of the speech to make it more compelling, and in fact he was even making last-minute adjustments as Baldwin was reading it live on air.

But the leader of the Labour party, Ramsay MacDonald, and the leaders of the Trades Union Congress, were not given the courtesy of a right to reply. Whilst Reith himself had been happy to accept the requests of the opposition to voice their own opinions on the BBC, Stanley Baldwin made it clear to Reith that he did not approve of that idea at all.

Thrown into a bit of a quandary, how did the boss of the supposedly neutral broadcasting company respond? In the interests of fairness and impartiality, did he resist the push from the government to silence the voice of the opposition? He did not.

Over the nine-day course of the strike, and in the absence of any print media, the sole outlet for news only gave a platform to those who agreed with the stance of the government and the mine owners, whilst we barely heard a peep from anyone who actually supported the one and a half million strikers. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury's request to broadcast a "peace appeal" on the BBC was turned down by Reith under heavy persuasion from the prime minister. This was probably because the Archbishop and other church leaders had come up with a proposal in which the miners wouldn't see their wages getting slashed if the government provided subsidies to the struggling coal industry, an idea which wasn't part of the government's holy plan. So the BBC had even shut down one of God's right-hand men.

Perhaps this blanket ban on alternative viewpoints partly explains why the General Strike only lasted nine days before it was called off by the TUC without a single concession ever being made. The miners fruitlessly stayed out on strike for another eight months. Whilst many of them would remain unemployed for years, the ones that did return to work were forced to accept the longer hours and the lower wages.

It does seem quite odd that whilst subsequent governments would usually complain that the BBC was biased against them, here was a very early example of the exact opposite. And another quite remarkable point here is that Winston Churchill – who at this point was the serving Chancellor of the Exchequer – still didn't feel that the BBC went quite far enough in its total subservience to the government's aggressive demands. He actually believed that the coverage was still too impartial if anything, and he was lobbying for the prime minister to commandeer the BBC so that it could be used as a propaganda tool. But more on Winston in just a moment.

In the meantime, the new British Broadcasting Company was facing heavy criticism from Labour MPs, TUC leaders, and supporters of the strike over its biased coverage, with Labour leader Ramsay Macdonald suggesting that the BBC had misled the public. John Reith made what might feel like a startling admission in the pages of his own recently launched magazine 'The Radio Times' when he conceded that the BBC was not entirely independent from the government, and that complete impartiality during a national emergency should not be expected. He also noted that under emergency regulations, the government would have had every right to take over the BBC.

An even more startling admission was privately made in the pages of his diary when he wrote: "The government know they can trust us not to be really impartial."

So just how shocked should we feel by this? Wasn't the BBC supposedly built on the foundations of being utterly impartial? And doesn't this mean that they were lying to us right from the very beginning? Well…no, not quite.

It's a bit of a misconception that the BBC was created on a promise of impartiality. Yes, it was an independent company but it was also fundamentally a private commercial company run by radio manufacturers. The original focus of the BBC wasn't so much about serving the public with impartial output but more about just trying to shift more radio sets.

It soon became apparent that this idea wasn't working out so well, largely because the public decided that they preferred to either buy the cheaper unofficial radio sets or build their own. The radio manufacturers quickly realised that they needed to jump ship from this loss-making broadcasting operation, and by 1927 the government accepted a proposal to effectively kill off The British Broadcasting Company and transform it into The British Broadcasting Corporation.

This new corporation was granted a Royal Charter which meant that it was now a non-commercial institution, completely independent from any direct influence from the government, or as near as dammit. And it was only at this point that the new BBC really began to bang on for the first time about its core mission to uphold due impartiality, as laid out in the Royal Charter.

The point is that it was only allowed to reach this point thanks to the shrewd manoeuvring and reluctant concessions of John Reith during the General Strike. Reith was admittedly a bit of a strange bloke at times. It's often noted that he would go on to become a bit of a fan of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. His diary entries praise Hitler's "magnificent efficiency" whilst expressing confidence that "The Nazis will clean things up and put Germany on the way to being a real power in Europe again."

In fairness, we have to remember that plenty of people were applauding Hitler in the 1930s. Even the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, was referring to him as one of the greatest men he had ever met. John Reith would have held a very different viewpoint in 1940 when he was serving as The Minister of Information during the Second World War and actively fighting against Nazi propaganda.

But back in 1926, Reith was fighting an altogether different kind of villain who went by the name of Winston Churchill. When Churchill was lobbying Stanley Baldwin to commandeer the BBC and use it as a propaganda tool, his efforts were being taken very seriously. Baldwin was giving it some serious consideration. It was just one day before the end of the General Strike that Baldwin made a formal decision not to commandeer the BBC, a decision which grumpy old Churchill later described as "monstrous."

But this decision is likely to have been heavily influenced by the recent concessions of John Reith and his impossible balancing act of attempting to maintain some kind of independence whilst appeasing the government. If Reith had played hard ball and insisted on broadcasting voices in support of the strike, it's possible that Churchill's argument to take over the BBC would have sounded a lot more compelling to Stanley Baldwin. By playing the long game and playing for time, John Reith paved the way for what would become the arguably impartial British Broadcasting Corporation, at which point his role changed from General Manager to the first ever Director-General of the new BBC.

The corporation was no longer restricted to broadcasting news bulletins only after 7pm, and they were allowed to employ their own journalists for the first time. They were even allowed to talk about what was actually going on when they were broadcasting from horse racing events. This was clearly a very different kind of BBC, and one which may never have existed had Reith not fought off the attack from Churchill.

Reith may not have been particularly proud of bending over to the government during the strike, but he felt the ends justified the means. As he put it himself: "I did what I didn't approve of myself doing. But I was so frightened of what Churchill would make of it."

Reith may have won this significant battle but the war between Churchill and the BBC would rage on for decades. Well, it could be argued that it was more of a personal war between Winston Churchill and Lord Reith who received a knighthood in 1927 in recognition of his services to broadcasting, and would later be given a seat in The House of Lords in 1940.

These two really disliked each other, to put it mildly. The short and portly Churchill referred to his six foot six nemesis as "That Wuthering Height." During a speech that Churchill made for The Royal Society of St George in 1934 that was being broadcast live by the BBC, he really took the opportunity to poke fun at the corporation and the director-general. He told the audience: "You see these microphones? They have been placed on our tables by the British Broadcasting Corporation. Think of the risk these eminent men are running. We can almost see them in our mind's eye, gathered together in that very expensive building with the questionable statues on its front. We can picture Sir John Reith, with the perspiration mantling on his lofty brow, with his hand on the control switch, wondering, as I utter every word, whether it will not be his duty to protect his innocent subscribers from some irreverent thing I might say about Mr. Gandhi, or about the Bolsheviks, or even about our peripatetic Prime Minister. But let me reassure him. I have much more serious topics to discuss. I have to speak to you about St. George and the Dragon."

John Reith was rather more succinct in his appraisal of Churchill in a diary entry from 1941: "I absolutely hate him."

A big part of the beef between the two was Churchill's perception that he had been blacklisted from the BBC between around 1928 to 1939. This wasn't technically true. We've literally just heard that he was slagging off the BBC on their own live broadcast in 1934, and he did make a few other brief addresses during the 1930s. But they were surprisingly rare for a man who would later be crowned the Greatest Briton in History, and many of his specific requests to make a broadcast were turned down.

At one point in 1929, Churchill even offered to pay the BBC a hundred pounds from his own pocket to make a political broadcast in what might have been seen as an attempt to bribe the corporation into letting him speak. Reith turned down the offer on the principle that he had no desire to follow what he viewed as the American model of allowing any old witless fool to broadcast for the right price.

By 1938, Churchill was publicly declaring that he had been muzzled and "very badly treated" by the BBC, although he obviously wasn't publicly declaring this on the BBC. He later privately told his doctor: "For eleven years, they kept me off the air. They prevented me from expressing views that proved to be right. Their behaviour has been tyrannical. They are honeycombed with Socialist…probably with Communists."

But was it true to say that Churchill had been unfairly banned, possibly due to the bitter ongoing feud with John Reith? Well again, not quite.

In his efforts to strive for political impartiality, Reith had left it up to the leaderships of each political party to decide which member got to speak on their behalf. This meant that prominent cabinet and shadow cabinet ministers were the ones usually selected to get their voices on the airwaves. The fact is that the future prime minister Churchill was a low-key backbencher during the 1930s, a period now described as his "wilderness years." It's not that he was banned by the BBC, it was simply that he wasn't considered important or relevant enough at the time by either the BBC, his own party, or the general public. Rather than accept this uncomfortable truth, Churchill preferred to complain that he was being stifled by the evil BBC. By modern standards, it's a bit like Liz Truss complaining that she's been barred from presenting her own weekly primetime TV show on Expert Economics.

It could be said that Churchill did eventually extract some form of vengeance over both Lord Reid and, much later on, the BBC that he so clearly despised. By the beginning of 1940, Reith had moved on from the BBC and had taken on the wartime position of Minister of Information in Neville Chamberlain's cabinet. Reith wasn't actually tied to a political party, but he had been elected unopposed in a by-election in Southampton as a "National" candidate serving a Conservative-led coalition government. It was destined to be a brief appointment, though. When Winston Churchill became prime minister in May 1940, his old foe was promptly booted out of the new war ministry.

The animosity was clearly still in full swing in 1942 when Churchill offered Reith the role of Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. This had actually been a position that Reith had always craved, and one that he would eventually accept 25 years later in 1967. But there was no way he was going to accept it from Churchill. On the same day that he rejected the role in 1942, his diary entry simply notes: "Invitation from that bloody shit Churchill to be Lord High Commissioner."

Churchill didn't seem to be a massive fan of television, and whilst he had spent years fruitlessly trying to get heard on the radio, he spent much of the 1950s trying to avoid getting his face on the idiot lantern. Some have suggested that this was because he was growing self-conscious about his age and his appearance, but he himself claimed that he just regarded the visual format as vulgar.

The event that really put television on the map and sparked a huge surge in sales of TV sets was of course the 1953 Coronation, but Churchill had been of the opinion that it shouldn't be televised at all, believing that it would be distasteful and too intrusive for the Queen. It was the Queen herself who strongly disagreed and insisted that the Coronation be seen by as many people as possible. That figure was estimated to be around 20 million which might sound a bit surprising as there were no more than three million of these fancy new television contraptions in the UK at the time, but this includes millions of people who were huddled around the sets of their posher neighbours.

But Winston Churchill did get his way when it came to breaking the BBC's television monopoly in 1954. The idea had been floated in the early '50s that commercial independent broadcasters should be given an opportunity to provide an alternative to the TV-hogging BBC. John Reith may have no longer worked at the corporation but he was vocal in his strong disapproval of the idea. As he put it: "Somebody introduced dog-racing into England, and somebody introduced smallpox, bubonic plague, and the Black Death. Somebody is minded now to introduce sponsored television." He went into a little more detail when he addressed The House of Lords in a passionate appeal for government ministers to protect the BBC's monopoly and preserve the public service heritage, denouncing the idea of commercial television as a shocking and unnecessary betrayal.

He wasn't alone in his disdain for the idea. Politicians from all parties, church leaders, and official bodies all vented their protests, with the former Labour Lord Chancellor, Earl Jowitt, warning ministers to take a look at the state of American commercial television of which he clearly wasn't much of an admirer. He quoted P.G Wodehouse when he described it as: "The foulest, ghastliest, loathsomest nightmare ever Inflicted by science on a suffering human race."

In truth, Winston Churchill probably wasn't a big supporter of the idea, either. If he thought the BBC was vulgar, just wait until he cops a load of ITV. But even so, he passed the 1954 Television Act which established an Independent Television Authority and paved the way for the launch of ITV in 1955. The BBC had lost their monopoly which was a bitter blow to the corporation, fuelled by what some might say was a bitter response from Churchill who was seeking revenge for his bad treatment.

Former BBC political editor Nick Robinson believes that the end of the monopoly and the creation of a brand new channel was the real legacy of the long-running feud between Churchill and Reith. Others suggest that this might be a bit over-dramatic as Churchill didn't seem massively interested either way in a proposal that was largely pushed forward by young Conservative MPs. But it was still Churchill that signed on the dotted line in what may well have been his final small victory in his epic war with the BBC.

The BBC would continue to battle with serving British governments right up until the present day and most likely well beyond. Margaret Thatcher's government spent much of their time at loggerheads with the Beeb in the 1980s. The coverage of The Falklands Conflict in 1982 provoked particular outrage from the government, mainly because the BBC insisted on referring to British soldiers as British soldiers instead of "our soldiers." The fury really boiled over when Newsnight presenter Peter Snow began a sentence with the words "If we believe the British…" implying that we shouldn't necessarily trust what our own government is telling us.

Thatcher clearly felt that the BBC should be patriotically cheering on our own soldiers and booing the Argentinian enemy. She condemned the coverage which she claimed treated the enemy like equals, whilst Conservative MP John Page described Peter Snow's comments as "almost treasonable." The BBC's own guidelines at the time had stated: "We are not Britain. We are the BBC." And in their defence, they pointed out that it is not the BBC's role to boost the morale of troops, and that the widow in Portsmouth was no different from the widow of Buenos Aires.

Thatcher just didn't seem to care for the BBC at all, and had a particular issue with the director-general Alasdair Milne whom she found chiefly responsible for all the failings. She frequently accused the corporation of left-wing bias, despite the fact that the BBC actually devoted significantly more airtime to the Conservatives than Labour during the 1980s. She also felt that the journalistic standards were poor, the news coverage was often irresponsible, and many of the TV shows were distasteful and offensive.

She did have a couple of weapons in her armoury which she deployed in her own battle against the BBC with mixed results. A memo from Downing Street revealed that she was already planning to quote "Knock the BBC down to size" very shortly after she came to power. She had come up with an idea of allowing viewers to opt out of paying for a TV licence and instead just buying a TV set that could only receive ITV. Some viewers at the time probably thought that this was not a bad idea. The whole concept of a TV licence funding the BBC was already feeling a little outdated after the introduction of an alternative commercial channel in 1955, and it's a concept that would become increasingly controversial in the decades to follow as we became spoilt for choice with the ever-growing number of channels. However, the idea never really got any further than that memo, perhaps because it would have been a massive expensive pain for manufacturers to produce new kinds of sets that were more restrictive than usual sets.

But then Thatcher came after the TV licence again in 1985 in what appeared to be a bid to force the BBC into evolving into just another commercial channel funded by advertising rather than a public service broadcaster with a Royal Charter. The government set up an inquiry headed by a guy called Professor Peacock who may have sounded like a character from Cluedo but was actually a leading economist.

The purpose of The Peacock Committee was to examine alternative ways to fund the BBC, and the government were expecting Peacock to conclude that the licence fee should be scrapped to make way for advertising. But that's not what happened at all. Peacock's strong recommendation was to keep the licence fee as introducing advertising on the BBC would have an unnecessarily harmful impact on ITV, and lead to a rapid decline in quality all-round as both channels chased the big ratings that would win over the relatively small pot of advertisers.

Thatcher did manage to score a couple of notable if slightly sinister triumphs, though. We mentioned earlier that the Royal Charter enables the institution to have independence from any direct influence from the government, but it's not quite total independence. As well as regularly reviewing and renewing the charter, the serving government also gets to choose the Chairman and the board of governors of the BBC, and many would point out that this does give the government a certain amount of influence over the corporation.

Historically, the serving government didn't abuse this power and usually strived to fill up the board of governors with a politically diverse mix of appointees, or even just significant figures with no strong political bias at all. Not so with Thatcher. She pretty much stuffed the board of governors full of staunch Conservatives and loyal Thatcherites in what may have felt like a shameless attempt to really sink her fangs into the corporation, although her reasoning was that she was trying to reshape an organisation with a left-wing bias. So, on the one hand she was complaining that the BBC was biased, and on the other hand she was ensuring that only card-carrying Tories were allowed to play on the board.

As if that wasn't enough, she also installed the Tory-friendly Marmaduke Hussey as the new Chairman of the BBC in 1986, and within just three months he and the board of Tory governors had got rid of the director-general Alasdair Milne with whom Thatcher had been having so much grief. Apparently, Milne was hauled into the office and told that he must resign immediately or be sacked. He had left the BBC building with all his belongings within 25 minutes of the surprise meeting, later describing the board of governors as "a bunch of amateurs."

And these were quite disturbing times for the BBC. Nearly sixty years after supposedly gaining true independence from the government, Margaret Thatcher was making it abundantly clear that this independence only went so far and that even the mighty BBC shouldn't mess with the Iron Lady. Thankfully, this kind of thing was dialled back again in later years, and subsequent governments took more balanced approaches in selecting governors and chairmen, give or take a bit of a wobble during the Boris Johnson era.

But still the sparring between the BBC and Westminster has never really stopped. Tony Blair's Labour government went to war with the BBC in 2003 when they furiously denied a reporter's claim that a senior official had admitted the Iraq dossier had been "sexed up" to strengthen the case for war. This was a tragic case which led to the senior official in question, Dr David Kelly, taking his own life. And it also led to The Hutton Inquiry which was highly critical of the BBC's editorial processes and resulted in the swift resignations of both the serving BBC Chairman and Director-General.

Moving forward to 2014, David Cameron's government were so furious with the BBC's allegedly biased coverage of the Autumn Statement and their "systematic exaggeration" that, according to political editor Nick Robinson, Cameron had threatened to close down the BBC after the next election.

Boris Johnson often threatened to scrap the licence fee whilst Liz Truss has recently revealed that she believes the BBC to be an "outrageous organisation" which is the epitome of what has gone wrong with Britain and should be defunded immediately. She also expressed how she and other Brits are cheering on President Trump with his $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC, and that she would prefer to see our TV licence money going towards Trump's administration rather than the BBC. We're not sure just how many Brits would genuinely agree with the idea of all the money we paid out for a public service broadcaster getting diverted into the hands of an American president. But it's probably not an entirely relevant question anyway, on several fronts.

Let's just say hypothetically that Trump wins the lawsuit and is awarded the full $10 billion in damages. That's a bit of a stretch but bear with us for a second. There seems to be an idea that in such a scenario, it would be the TV licence payer that ultimately foots the bill. The problem there is the BBC doesn't have anything close to $10 billion in its coffers. It raises about three and a half billion pounds a year from the licence fee but that has already been allocated to programming. To be blunt, the BBC would be stuffed if it suddenly had to find $10 billion, and would potentially require a bailout from the government to survive. That would essentially mean that it's the taxpayer who would carry the burden.

Bearing that in mind, you'd think that Keir Starmer would be a little worried about the results of the lawsuit, and might be rushing to the defence of the BBC. But so far, he has refused to get involved and has only commented that the BBC needs to get its house in order. Liz Truss hates the Beeb so much that she's probably still cheering on Trump in the firm belief that it's better to give our tax to the Trump administration than keep it within the UK economy.

But just how likely is a victory for Trump? Well, not very likely at all. For starters, he would need to prove that the episode of 'Panorama' was broadcast in Florida where the lawsuit was filed. The BBC insists that it was only ever broadcast in the UK and that even the availability of the episode on iPlayer was restricted to the UK. It's possible that viewers in Florida could have accessed the episode by using a VPN, but it would be hard to pin any blame on the BBC for that, and the amount of viewers who would have bothered to do so is likely to be tiny.

Trump would also need to prove that the edited clips broadcast in 2024 caused him reputational harm. You probably don'tneed us to remind you that Trump went on to win the election, so it's hard to see just how much reputational harm was inflicted on him by a programme broadcast in the UK that might have been seen by a few viewers in Florida who circumvented the geographical block. On top of that, he would need to prove that the clips were edited with actual malicious intent which again could be quite tricky. It's clear that the BBC made a mistake with the splicing together of these clips, but surely not a $10 billion mistake. Even if the BBC is ordered to make a payment to Trump, the figure is likely to be nowhere remotely close to $10 billion because the man who went on to win the election surely didn't suffer $10 billion worth of damage. If anything, it's a little surprising that Trump has made the decision to file the lawsuit and bring attention back to the controversial speech in the first place. Some might say that he's not really interested in getting any money, he's just making a big dramatic point. But in doing so, he's reminding everyone that this speech led to him getting impeached for incitement to insurrection by the U.S. House of Representatives. The speech was also heavily referenced when he was later indicted on four felony counts relating to trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. None of this mattered much in the long term, of course. He was acquitted in the Senate impeachment trial just a month later, and those four charges were dropped when he won the next election as apparently you don't get to prosecute a sitting president. But in launching the lawsuit, he's dragging all this right back into the spotlight and with no obvious reward. At the time of recording this video, the BBC are currently seeking to get the case dismissed, and we'll watch how things unfold with interest. But it seems very improbable that the outcome will involve the BBC making any kind of major payout to a man who claimed that they were putting words in his mouth with artificial intelligence. Condolences to Liz Truss, but we don't think Trump is the man destined to take down the insufferably smug and sanctimonious leftist propaganda machine that we call the BBC. And that brings us to the final question. In light of all we've heard, can we really trust the BBC to be as impartial as it promises to be in the Royal Charter? If we were being pedantic, we could say that the BBC can never be truly impartial, as that would involve giving a fair and equal platform to all kinds of people including holocaust deniers, flat Earthers, cult leaders, Nazis, sex offenders, and fans of Nickelback. Instead, the Royal Charter requires the BBC to provide "due impartiality" which involves giving appropriate weight to certain perspectives based on evidence and public consensus. And that itself makes people suspicious as the BBC themselves are having to make these daily judgement calls on what is considered to be acceptable, although this is surely a healthier scenario than running a weekly TV show called "Homophobic Hour." One surprising insider opinion came from former BBC political editor Andrew Marr in 2006. During an internal BBC seminar on impartiality, he stated quite clearly: "The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It's a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities, and gay people. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias." Members of the public agree with Andrew Marr that the corporation is biased, but the crucial difference is that they can't quite make up their minds in which direction. A recent YouGov poll from 2025 found that nearly half of viewers believed the BBC to be biased, but 31% felt that it was biased in favour of left-wing views whilst 19% felt that it was biased in favour of right-wing views. 31% responded that they didn't know – presumably because they only watch Channel 5 - and only 19% felt that the BBC was not politically biased. But whilst we often hear claims that the BBC is a left-wing or anti-Conservative organisation, it's worth remembering the closest the corporation came to having dangerous impartiality at its very core was when Margaret Thatcher and, to a lesser extent, Boris Johnson, filled up the board of governors with devout Tories, leading in the former case to the swift removal of a Director-General with whom the prime minister was engaged in a war of words. Thatcher and Johnson would no doubt argue that this was a necessary step to combat the corporation's heavy bias against them. But the BBC has always copped the flak from both sides, and they've been embroiled in vicious battles with Labour governments over the decades. In fact it's difficult to think of any serving government in history that had what could be described as a good relationship with the BBC. One line of thinking here is that if both sides of the political spectrum are getting their knickers in a twist about perceived impartiality then the BBC must be somewhere close to striking the right balance. Perhaps the truth is that any serving government believes the BBC are against them when it becomes clear they're not being relentlessly showered with gushing praise and support, which of course is not the BBC's job. Right now, Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer will probably be feeling quite annoyed that the BBC are constantly talking about how much longer he can cling onto his position instead of cheerfully banging on about all his wonderful achievements. If you already have deep-rooted opinions about the impartiality of the BBC then we're not here to change your mind either way. It's worth considering that it's pretty tough – maybe even impossible - to be consistently impartial at all times when news editors and journalists are making quick decisions involving time restraints and narrative and framing, whilst constantly facing hostile scrutiny and criticism at every turn. And perhaps it's too easy to just pick out occasional items that they got wrong from millions of hours of broadcasting and then loudly conclude that the BBC is bent. On the other hand, some would argue that they've made far too many mistakes over the years, and that we shouldn't need to continue funding a supposedly impartial public service broadcaster from our own pockets in the modern era. It would be strange to consider a future without the BBC, or at least a drastically slimmed-down BBC without a Royal Charter and reliant on either advertising or optional subscriptions. And whilst the corporation may have its critics today, just imagine how different things could have been if The Greatest Briton in History had got his way and seized the BBC as a propaganda tool for the government. Letters of complaint would have been flooding into 'Points of View' except of course that other points of view would never have been broadcast on such a network. In light of this, we think the BBC should run another poll for The Greatest Briton in History to see if we can get a better result next time. A word of caution, though. If it involves a telephone vote, for God's sake don't put 'Blue Peter' in charge of it.  Key Takeaways  The BBC has faced accusations of political bias and deceptive editing from powerful figures across the political spectrum throughout its century-long history. A 2025 Panorama documentary misleadingly spliced Trump's January 2021 speech, prompting a $10 billion lawsuit and resignations of two senior BBC executives. Martin Bashir used forged documents to secure Princess Diana's 1995 Panorama interview; the BBC covered up this deception for 25 years before the Dyson Report exposed it. BBC founder John Reith privately admitted the government could trust the BBC not to be truly impartial, particularly during the 1926 General Strike when opposition voices were silenced. Winston Churchill feuded with the BBC for decades, claiming he was muzzled during his wilderness years, though the article suggests he simply wasn't prominent enough for airtime then.    Frequently Asked Questions What was the 'Crowngate' scandal involving the BBC and Queen Elizabeth II?In 2007, the BBC aired a promotional trailer for 'Monarchy: The Royal Family at Work' that misleadingly edited footage to suggest Queen Elizabeth II had stormed out of a photoshoot with photographer Annie Leibovitz in a huff. In reality, the Queen's seemingly angry comments were made while walking *into* the photoshoot, not leaving it. The sequences were shown out of order. This led to the resignation of BBC1 controller Peter Fincham, the first serving controller of BBC1 to resign in disgrace, along with BBC head of press Jane Fletcher and RDF Media's chief creative officer. How did Martin Bashir secure his 1995 Panorama interview with Princess Diana?Martin Bashir used forged bank statements and other fake documents to deceive Diana's brother, Earl Spencer, into believing that Diana's inner circle was betraying her. The documents falsely claimed her private secretary Patrick Jephson was spying on her for money, her chauffeur was leaking stories to newspapers, and that Prince Charles's secretary had received dubious payments. Bashir also falsely claimed MI5 was following Diana and that nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke had had an affair with Prince Charles resulting in pregnancy and abortion. These deceptions led Earl Spencer to encourage his sister to trust Bashir and give the interview. What were the consequences of the Martin Bashir deception for people around Princess Diana?Several innocent people lost their jobs or had their careers damaged due to Bashir's forged documents. Patrick Jephson, Diana's private secretary of eight years, resigned after his relationship with Diana broke down. Chauffeur Stephen Davies was sacked without explanation. Freelance graphic designer Matt Wiessler, who created the fake documents, was blacklisted by the BBC and his career stalled. Panorama producer Mark Killick was sacked after warning the BBC about Bashir's use of fake documents. Diana herself died in a 1997 car crash without ever learning she had been deceived. What was the outcome of the 2021 Dyson Report regarding the Bashir interview?The Dyson Report, led by senior judge Lord Dyson and published in 2021, found that Martin Bashir had consistently lied and used 'deceitful and deceptive tactics' to gain Diana's trust. It criticized the BBC's original 1996 internal review led by Tony Hall as 'woefully ineffective' and concluded that 'without justification, the BBC fell short of the high standards of integrity and transparency which are its hallmark.' The BBC paid substantial settlements to those wronged, including £750,000 to whistleblower Matt Wiessler, £100,000 to Patrick Jephson (donated to charity), and approximately £1.5 million to the Princess of Wales Memorial Fund from overseas profits of the interview. What was the BBC's role during the 1926 General Strike?During the 1926 General Strike, when newspapers were shut down, the BBC became the sole source of news information. However, under General Manager John Reith, the BBC heavily favored the Conservative government position. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was given a platform to broadcast his plea for strikers to return to work, with Reith even making last-minute adjustments to his speech. Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald and TUC leaders were denied right of reply. The Archbishop of Canterbury's 'peace appeal' was also rejected. Reith later admitted in his diary: 'The government know they can trust us not to be really impartial.' What was the nature of Winston Churchill's feud with the BBC?Winston Churchill's feud with the BBC began around 1926 and lasted decades. Churchill believed he had been 'muzzled' and 'very badly treated' by the BBC for about eleven years, claiming they prevented him from expressing views that 'proved to be right.' While he did make some broadcasts, many of his requests were turned down. However, the article notes this was partly because during his 'wilderness years' of the 1930s, he was a low-key backbencher not considered important enough by his own party or the BBC for regular airtime. Churchill later broke the BBC's television monopoly by passing the 1954 Television Act establishing ITV, which some view as his final revenge. What were the 'Blue Peter' scandals involving deception of viewers?Blue Peter was involved in several deception scandals: (1) In 1962, the original puppy named Petra died of distemper days after her debut, but producers secretly replaced her with a lookalike without telling viewers for 46 years. (2) In 2007, a viewer vote to name a cat resulted in 'Cookie' winning, but editor Richard Marson ignored the result and announced 'Socks' as the winner instead. (3) In 2006, a 'Shoe Biz' UNICEF appeal used a premium-rate phone line where 40,000 children called in, but due to a technical fault, no one could get through. Rather than admit this, a young girl visiting the studio was coached to pretend to be a winning caller, leading to BBC's first £50,000 Ofcom fine. What is President Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC about?In December 2025, President Trump filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit in Miami, Florida against the BBC regarding a 2024 Panorama episode titled 'Trump: A Second Chance?' The lawsuit claims the program misleadingly spliced together clips from Trump's January 2021 speech to suggest he gave a continuous instruction to march to the Capitol and 'fight like hell,' when these remarks were actually about 50 minutes apart. The documentary also cut to footage of supporters marching that was filmed before Trump finished speaking. An internal BBC memo by adviser Michael Prescott later called this 'systematic bias.' The lawsuit alleges intentional defamation with actual malice and violation of Florida trade practices law, seeking $5 billion on each of two counts. How did Margaret Thatcher attempt to influence or change the BBC?Margaret Thatcher clashed repeatedly with the BBC, accusing it of left-wing bias despite data showing more Conservative airtime. She considered allowing viewers to opt out of the TV licence for ITV-only sets, and in 1985 set up the Peacock Committee to examine alternative funding (though it recommended keeping the licence fee). More directly, she stuffed the BBC Board of Governors with staunch Conservatives and loyal Thatcherites, and in 1986 installed Marmaduke Hussey as Chairman. Within three months, Hussey and the Tory-heavy board forced director-general Alasdair Milne to resign immediately or be sacked. Thatcher also frequently criticized BBC journalistic standards and found many programs 'distasteful and offensive.' What did John Reith, the BBC's first General Manager, admit about BBC impartiality?John Reith, the BBC's original General Manager and later first Director-General, made startling admissions about impartiality. During the 1926 General Strike, he conceded in The Radio Times that the BBC was not entirely independent from government and complete impartiality during a national emergency should not be expected. More revealingly, he wrote privately in his diary: 'The government know they can trust us not to be really impartial.' The article notes this was during the British Broadcasting Company period before it became a corporation with a Royal Charter in 1927, when the mission of 'due impartiality' was formally established.

<!-- aeo:section end="the-thick-of-it" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="key-takeaways" -->
## Key Takeaways

- The BBC has faced accusations of political bias and deceptive editing from powerful figures across the political spectrum throughout its century-long history.
- A 2025 Panorama documentary misleadingly spliced Trump's January 2021 speech, prompting a $10 billion lawsuit and resignations of two senior BBC executives.
- Martin Bashir used forged documents to secure Princess Diana's 1995 Panorama interview; the BBC covered up this deception for 25 years before the Dyson Report exposed it.
- BBC founder John Reith privately admitted the government could trust the BBC not to be truly impartial, particularly during the 1926 General Strike when opposition voices were silenced.
- Winston Churchill feuded with the BBC for decades, claiming he was muzzled during his wilderness years, though the article suggests he simply wasn't prominent enough for airtime then.

<!-- aeo:section end="key-takeaways" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="frequently-asked-questions" -->
## Frequently Asked Questions

### What was the 'Crowngate' scandal involving the BBC and Queen Elizabeth II?

In 2007, the BBC aired a promotional trailer for 'Monarchy: The Royal Family at Work' that misleadingly edited footage to suggest Queen Elizabeth II had stormed out of a photoshoot with photographer Annie Leibovitz in a huff. In reality, the Queen's seemingly angry comments were made while walking *into* the photoshoot, not leaving it. The sequences were shown out of order. This led to the resignation of BBC1 controller Peter Fincham, the first serving controller of BBC1 to resign in disgrace, along with BBC head of press Jane Fletcher and RDF Media's chief creative officer.

### How did Martin Bashir secure his 1995 Panorama interview with Princess Diana?

Martin Bashir used forged bank statements and other fake documents to deceive Diana's brother, Earl Spencer, into believing that Diana's inner circle was betraying her. The documents falsely claimed her private secretary Patrick Jephson was spying on her for money, her chauffeur was leaking stories to newspapers, and that Prince Charles's secretary had received dubious payments. Bashir also falsely claimed MI5 was following Diana and that nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke had had an affair with Prince Charles resulting in pregnancy and abortion. These deceptions led Earl Spencer to encourage his sister to trust Bashir and give the interview.

### What were the consequences of the Martin Bashir deception for people around Princess Diana?

Several innocent people lost their jobs or had their careers damaged due to Bashir's forged documents. Patrick Jephson, Diana's private secretary of eight years, resigned after his relationship with Diana broke down. Chauffeur Stephen Davies was sacked without explanation. Freelance graphic designer Matt Wiessler, who created the fake documents, was blacklisted by the BBC and his career stalled. Panorama producer Mark Killick was sacked after warning the BBC about Bashir's use of fake documents. Diana herself died in a 1997 car crash without ever learning she had been deceived.

### What was the outcome of the 2021 Dyson Report regarding the Bashir interview?

The Dyson Report, led by senior judge Lord Dyson and published in 2021, found that Martin Bashir had consistently lied and used 'deceitful and deceptive tactics' to gain Diana's trust. It criticized the BBC's original 1996 internal review led by Tony Hall as 'woefully ineffective' and concluded that 'without justification, the BBC fell short of the high standards of integrity and transparency which are its hallmark.' The BBC paid substantial settlements to those wronged, including £750,000 to whistleblower Matt Wiessler, £100,000 to Patrick Jephson (donated to charity), and approximately £1.5 million to the Princess of Wales Memorial Fund from overseas profits of the interview.

### What was the BBC's role during the 1926 General Strike?

During the 1926 General Strike, when newspapers were shut down, the BBC became the sole source of news information. However, under General Manager John Reith, the BBC heavily favored the Conservative government position. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was given a platform to broadcast his plea for strikers to return to work, with Reith even making last-minute adjustments to his speech. Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald and TUC leaders were denied right of reply. The Archbishop of Canterbury's 'peace appeal' was also rejected. Reith later admitted in his diary: 'The government know they can trust us not to be really impartial.'

### What was the nature of Winston Churchill's feud with the BBC?

Winston Churchill's feud with the BBC began around 1926 and lasted decades. Churchill believed he had been 'muzzled' and 'very badly treated' by the BBC for about eleven years, claiming they prevented him from expressing views that 'proved to be right.' While he did make some broadcasts, many of his requests were turned down. However, the article notes this was partly because during his 'wilderness years' of the 1930s, he was a low-key backbencher not considered important enough by his own party or the BBC for regular airtime. Churchill later broke the BBC's television monopoly by passing the 1954 Television Act establishing ITV, which some view as his final revenge.

### What were the 'Blue Peter' scandals involving deception of viewers?

Blue Peter was involved in several deception scandals: (1) In 1962, the original puppy named Petra died of distemper days after her debut, but producers secretly replaced her with a lookalike without telling viewers for 46 years. (2) In 2007, a viewer vote to name a cat resulted in 'Cookie' winning, but editor Richard Marson ignored the result and announced 'Socks' as the winner instead. (3) In 2006, a 'Shoe Biz' UNICEF appeal used a premium-rate phone line where 40,000 children called in, but due to a technical fault, no one could get through. Rather than admit this, a young girl visiting the studio was coached to pretend to be a winning caller, leading to BBC's first £50,000 Ofcom fine.

### What is President Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC about?

In December 2025, President Trump filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit in Miami, Florida against the BBC regarding a 2024 Panorama episode titled 'Trump: A Second Chance?' The lawsuit claims the program misleadingly spliced together clips from Trump's January 2021 speech to suggest he gave a continuous instruction to march to the Capitol and 'fight like hell,' when these remarks were actually about 50 minutes apart. The documentary also cut to footage of supporters marching that was filmed before Trump finished speaking. An internal BBC memo by adviser Michael Prescott later called this 'systematic bias.' The lawsuit alleges intentional defamation with actual malice and violation of Florida trade practices law, seeking $5 billion on each of two counts.

### How did Margaret Thatcher attempt to influence or change the BBC?

Margaret Thatcher clashed repeatedly with the BBC, accusing it of left-wing bias despite data showing more Conservative airtime. She considered allowing viewers to opt out of the TV licence for ITV-only sets, and in 1985 set up the Peacock Committee to examine alternative funding (though it recommended keeping the licence fee). More directly, she stuffed the BBC Board of Governors with staunch Conservatives and loyal Thatcherites, and in 1986 installed Marmaduke Hussey as Chairman. Within three months, Hussey and the Tory-heavy board forced director-general Alasdair Milne to resign immediately or be sacked. Thatcher also frequently criticized BBC journalistic standards and found many programs 'distasteful and offensive.'

### What did John Reith, the BBC's first General Manager, admit about BBC impartiality?

John Reith, the BBC's original General Manager and later first Director-General, made startling admissions about impartiality. During the 1926 General Strike, he conceded in The Radio Times that the BBC was not entirely independent from government and complete impartiality during a national emergency should not be expected. More revealingly, he wrote privately in his diary: 'The government know they can trust us not to be really impartial.' The article notes this was during the British Broadcasting Company period before it became a corporation with a Royal Charter in 1927, when the mission of 'due impartiality' was formally established.

<!-- aeo:section end="frequently-asked-questions" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="sources" -->
## Sources

- [Original Scandal video: The BBC Has Been Lying to You for 100 Years](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7ND0lT4lyk)
- [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Hattiesburg_Mississippi_newspaper_front-page_headline.jpeg) by HubCityMan1912 / openverse, by-sa.

<!-- aeo:section end="sources" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="related-coverage" -->
## Related Coverage
<!-- aeo:section end="related-coverage" -->