Huw Edwards BBC presenter

 

 

 

 

Quote: "The wife of news reader Huw Edwards has named him as the BBC presenter at the centre of the allegations. In a statement issued on his behalf, Vicky Flind says her husband is "suffering mental health issues" and is now receiving in-patient hospital care. Detectives from the Met Police have ended their inquiry into a BBC presenter and determined there is no evidence a criminal offence has been committed. The BBC says it is now resuming its investigation "whilst continuing to be mindful of our duty of care to all involved”."

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September 2023

‘No one expects him back’: what now for the BBC’s Huw Edwards?

Last September, Huw Edwards sprinted out of a barbershop near his south London home after being summoned to the BBC’s headquarters so he could announce Queen Elizabeth’s death to the nation.

Now the BBC is weighing up whether it can ever reuse footage of Edwards’s historic royal broadcast, with the presenter still suspended in the wake of the Sun’s partly-retracted allegation that he paid a 17-year-old for explicit images.

It has been almost two months since the newspaper sparked both the fiercest and shortest BBC scandal in recent history. Within a week, it went from being a story that could topple the director general to one that was barely meriting a mention in the wider media.

Yet questions remain for the BBC, the Sun and the presenter himself – and it is unclear whether Edwards will ever be able to unwind the knotty mess of public, personal and workplace issues that have him left him off air.

One senior BBC journalist summarised the verdict of large parts of the newsroom when it comes to Edwards’s employment prospects: “No one expects him to come back.”

Some of Edwards’s closest colleagues say they have not heard from him in weeks. They say he is not responding to messages.

Though the police declined to investigate the Sun’s allegations, which were based on the testimony of concerned parents, Edwards still faces an internal workplace investigation that will consider whether he brought the broadcaster into disrepute.

Key individuals have yet to be updated on the progress of the BBC inquiry, which is described as still being at the “fact-finding” stage, suggesting there is no imminent conclusion in sight, with the presenter suspended and believed to be on his full £435,000-a-year pay.

One of the key issues that fanned the flames of the original story was the vague language used by the Sun in its original reporting – which the newspaper argues was an attempt to protect Edwards’s privacy.

The tabloid used gender-neutral terms such as “child” and “young person” to describe the person alleged to have been paid tens of thousands of pounds by Edwards in return for explicit pictures.

This – along with the mention of the individual being 17 when communication began – gave the impression that Edwards may have committed a criminal offence.

Dame Elan Closs Stephens, the BBC’s interim chair, subsequently told a parliamentary committee that the individual alleged to have received the money from Edwards was a “young man”.

The decision by the top BBC board member to state the gender of the 20-year-old at the heart of the allegations was largely overlooked at the time of the hearing.

But in response, Victoria Newton, the editor of the Sun, told the same committee that Closs Stephens had revealed more details about the young person than her newspaper. She said: “At no point have we identified the gender of the young person, which the BBC has done on more than one occasion.”

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