The president of the BBC, on the tightrope for helping Boris Johnson to get a loan and hide it

2023-04-19 22:05:33

After months of resisting resignation, BBC president Richard Sharp faces the publication of a “disastrous” report in the coming days about the favors he did for Boris Johnson before he was appointed and the benefits he received in return. , as announced this Wednesday by the Financial Times.

Tim Bale, political scientist: “Brexit has accelerated the shift of the Conservative Party towards the populist radical right”

Further

In 2020, Sharp helped the then British Prime Minister get a loan of 800,000 pounds (more than 900,000 euros) by putting him in contact with a Canadian businessman, Sam Blyth, to endorse Johnson’s request, the newspaper revealed this January. The Times. The favor to Johnson happened in November 2020. That is, three months before Sharp was appointed president of the BBC after the recommendation of the Government. Sharp was a donor to the Conservative Party and had developed close relationships with leading tories, including the current prime minister, Rishi Sunak, with whom he worked at the investment bank Goldman Sachs. But he did not disclose these personal arrangements for Johnson during the confirmation process, which expressly prohibits considering a candidate who has not declared potential conflicts of interest.

Following the information uncovered by journalists, the parliamentary appointment committee said in February that Sharp had made “significant errors of judgement” and had failed to inform lawmakers of “all the facts”, but the BBC chairman refused to resign. . Since then, he has barely been seen at the headquarters of the public corporation.

In the coming days, the result of the independent investigation by lawyer Adam Heppinstall, appointed by the agency in charge of supervising public appointments to clarify Sharp’s role in the loan and other possible conflicts discovered after the publication of the exclusive of the Times.

The Johnson loan may not be the only one of Sharp’s conflicts of interest. He Guardian He also revealed that in May 2020 a medical services company called Oncimmune of which Sharp was a director and in which he retains shares received public aid of almost 600,000 pounds (680,000 euros) three months after he left the company to work as an adviser. of Sunak in the Treasury, responsible for that program of grants for research on COVID-19.

Sharp has already been informed of the conclusions of the Heppinstall report whose result has been described as “disastrous” by the sources consulted by the Financial Times. “Richard may decide to jump before they push him,” a person briefed on the draft report told the newspaper. “This is very difficult for him. He is looking for ways to justify his behavior. It seems likely, even if he is not sure, that he will have to leave,” he maintained.

A source consulted by the Guardian He described the report as “very uncomfortable” for Sharp and commented that his future at the BBC “doesn’t look good”.

reputation

The objective of the rules on potential conflicts of interest of those responsible is to protect the image of the BBC, whose essential identity is autonomy from the government in power, even though the appointment of the president is a political process that takes place in Parliament. The person responsible for editorial decisions is not the president, but the general director.

Public broadcasting, financed by a fee paid directly by the owners of a television or by those who watch the channel on streamingboasts of its independence established in a detailed statute, but several controversies have tarnished its reputation in recent months.

The most serious crisis was the suspension of star sports presenter and former footballer Gary Lineker in March for writing a tweet critical of the Home Secretary for her messages against refugees arriving on British shores and a new law that will ban them from seeking asylum. and will deport them to Rwanda contrary to international law on asylum seekers. Lineker was suspended and sports journalists from various radio and television programs refused to go on the air so the BBC had to cancel its regular sports programming. After the internal rebellion and multiple criticisms, the person responsible for the decision, the director general of the BBC, Tim Davie, apologized to Lineker, promised to review the rules on the use of social networks and returned the presenter to his space.

The “party in the media”

Lineker’s case sparked a broader debate about attempted interference at the BBC and the rules on impartiality that have been applied unevenly to presenters of entertainment spots.

Several journalists claim to have received pressure from Downing Street in the last two years. For example, in March 2020, BBC editorial managers broadcast the Boris Johnson government’s request for its journalists to avoid the word “lockdown” (with little success as it continued to be ubiquitous with each health restriction).

Often, the pressure for the BBC also comes from the aggressive front pages and opinion columns of newspapers such as the Telegraph and the Daily Mail.

This is an example of the influence of the so-called “party in the media”, according to the definition of Professor Tim Bale and author of the recently published book The Conservative Party After Brexit (the Conservative Party after Brexit). This influential group is made up of “right-wing columnists, editors and print media owners, who set the agenda for the Conservative Party in a way that is not the case in most continental European countries, where, although the The press is quite partisan, it is not the force that it still is in the United Kingdom”, as Bale explained in an interview with elDiario.es. “His influence within the Conservative Party, ironically, is based on a misinterpretation of his influence on voters. It’s very hard to persuade politicians that newspapers don’t make a big difference to voters. Where they make a difference is in the way they set the agenda for public broadcasting. If you look at the BBC’s coverage… it’s often driven by the same agenda that newspapers like the Mail and the Telegraph in particular,” he said. As Bale explained to elDiario.es, even the tabloid The Sun Mark the topics that are in charge of the BBC news.

The attacks on the BBC are part of what Bale sees as a shift by the Conservative Party towards “the populist radical right”, which also consists of targeting what is caricatured as the elite, including public broadcaster journalists. In the background, there is the fight to limit the resources of the BBC in the medium and long term.

In 2022 the Johnson government announced a rule change to freeze the public broadcasting budget and eliminate the royalty in 2027. Since then, the BBC has already announced cuts to local stations, music programs and its influential international news service.