BBC Panorama’s Carrickmore incident features in the first instalment of David Dimbleby’s recent documentary trilogy on BBC scandals. In 1979, as acting senior press officer for the BBC, I was running a campaign for the licence fee as well as handling daily BBC crises with my bosses. Margaret Thatcher was prime minister. The then BBC chairman of governors, Michael Swann, had been contacted by Downing Street, asking him to bury the BBC film on the IRA in Carrickmore. The programme was indeed pulled. Journalists felt justifiably angry at the interference. The public was denied insight into the IRA’s behaviour and had no say.
Forty-three years on, Emily Maitlis finds herself under disproportionate attack from BBC establishment figures for her 2022 MacTaggart lecture that questioned the speed at which the BBC gave a high-profile public apology to the government for remarks that she made on Newsnight in 2020 about Dominic Cummings. Will Wyatt, a former BBC chief executive, wrote to the Guardian criticising Maitlis (Letters, 28 August) and the current chairman, Richard Sharp, condemned her assessment.
In her speech, Maitlis had described BBC board member Robbie Gibb as “an active agent of the Conservative party”, because of his former role as a government spin doctor and his association with the BBC rival GB News. We are talking about the board of governors, not the people who are supposed to be in charge editorially.
There is no doubt in my view that she was right to expose this inappropriate appointment, particularly when the country faces many threats to democracy. Without an independent BBC, full of highly skilled journalists, our resilience to any one threat would be seriously undermined.
Rosie Brocklehurst
St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex
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