When Tim Davie was briefly catapulted into the BBC director general role 10 years ago, amid the fallout from the Jimmy Savile scandal, he remarked to the corporation’s official historian: “Can you survive being DG?”
It is a question he may be asking again, after his decision to suspend Gary Lineker over a tweet about the government’s asylum policy triggered an extraordinary walkout by BBC stars and a deepening crisis on the very issue he had vowed to resolve: impartiality.
The furore, which forced the BBC to axe most of the weekend’s football coverage, is easily the biggest test to face Davie, 55, since he was appointed director general in June 2020.
The former Pepsi marketeer made no secret in his first days in the job that he intended to restore “trust and confidence” in the BBC by reflecting all sides of the political divide.
Allies told Tory-supporting newspapers that this in part meant tackling a “perceived leftwing bias” in the BBC’s comedy output. A fortnight later it axed the satirical show, The Mash Report, a first shot in what some called Davie’s “war on woke”.
His decision to suspend Lineker, the BBC’s highest-paid presenter, has stunned corporation insiders and given fresh ammunition to those who believe its leadership is too close to the party of government.
Its chair, Richard Sharp, is at the centre of two investigations over his appointment after it emerged he had donated £400,000 to the Conservatives and helped facilitate an £800,000 loan facility to Boris Johnson, weeks before the then prime minister recommended him for the job.
Davie has his own links to the Tories. He was deputy chairman of the Hammersmith and Fulham Conservative party in the 1990s and stood unsuccessfully as a councillor in 1993 and 1994.
He remains good friends with the Tory peer Stephen Greenhalgh, who was until last year a minister in Johnson’s government, and who celebrated Davie’s appointment in a tweet in 2020: “Congrats to my mate Tim Davie just appointed @BBC Director-General”.
A keen marathon runner, Davie was in contention for the role of chief executive of the Premier League before landing the BBC job. He joined the corporation in 2005 as its head of marketing, having led a similar role at Pepsi in Europe.
The Cambridge-educated executive has scaled the heights of BBC management for more than a decade, including a stint as head of audio and music, when he backed down on plans to scrap 6Music and the Asian Network following a public outcry.
It is Davie’s second stint in the £525,000-a-year top job. He was parachuted in as temporary director-general in late 2012 amid the fallout of the Savile scandal and a botched Newsnight investigation.
That was a crisis that brought down the then-director general, George Entwistle, after just 54 days in office. Davie will hope that both he and Lineker can find a way to survive the latest controversy.
