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.
