Who would like to be the new director general of the BBC? The answer should be “pretty much anyone at the top level of broadcasting”. The challenge of securing the century-old corporation’s new Royal Charter, which decides funding and reason for being for the next decade, with a seat at the top table of national life, looks like the plummiest of jobs.
Its outgoing holder, Tim Davie, ended up with a pay package of well over half a million – less than other big media boss roles, but not too bad either. Still, the question hanging over this race has been: “Who’d be mad enough to want it?”
The circumstances in which both a confident director general and his hand-picked “CEO” of news, Deborah Turness, resigned over a series of unforced errors, plus a civil war over the influence of Robbie Gibb, a Conservative political appointee to the board, have made the big job look more like a career hazard than an opportunity.
Davie and Turness announced their departure after a furious row exploded when it was revealed the long-running and respected Panorama programme had spliced two sections of a speech together made by Donald Trump during the Capitol uprising of January 6th 2021. Trump is now suing the BBC for £10bn, accusing the corporation of misrepresenting him and of it being a sign of a finger-on-the-scale tendency in covering Trump and ultra-conservative movements. The BBC is fighting back, arguing that the US President has failed to state a claim and that the documentary caused him no harm.
Since the new year, Davie sounds relieved to be heading out the door in his signature white trainers. Asked by one friend how he reckoned things were going, he replied in choice language that thankfully, this was no longer his problem. Davie, who has a strong commercial background and drove the expansion of BBC studios and the broadcaster’s US footprint, won’t be short of offers. He is close to the London leadership of KKR, the massive US private equity firm which invests in media assets, which could be a destination among many others.
Egon Zehnder, the head-hunting firm to whom the BBC turns in moments of panicky change, has assembled a short list of candidates. Interviews are due to start in the next few weeks. Even that process is causing tongues to wag. Some think that the company charged with finding the best candidates has been slow to be more proactive in assembling a really wide field to avoid the “Buggins’ turn” sense that can surround BBC races.
“This time, they are not going to get a row of candidates sitting obediently outside the waiting room waiting for their turn,” says one person familiar with the process. “One highly viable candidate did not hear from the head-hunters by the time applications formally closed – so even now, they need to be more proactive to generate top-level competition.”
Davie ended up with a pay package of well over £500,000 (Photo: Carl Court/Getty)Overseeing the process is Samir Shah, the BBC chairman, who is himself under pressure to defend his record over failing to contain the internal strife between the BBC board, and a flashpoint report commissioned at the behest of Robbie Gibb, a former head of political coverage at the BBC. Gibb became No 10 comms chief under Theresa May, and was appointed to the board (twice) by the Conservatives.
A recent former executive says: “No sensible new boss would take this job without guarantees their hands would not be tied into the mess that blew up at the end of 2025. Senior people in governance could not find a language or indeed processes to communicate with each other, hear out big issues and resolve tensions.
“A strong candidate might very well say ‘I can take this on’, but we need a transition of Chairman, too.”
Shah, however, is keen to remain in post and sees the director general race as the first step in clearing up a poly-crisis which began before he became chair.
A fundamental stand-off underpins all of this over whether the BBC’s problems are organisational. It is hardly the only media organisation to have struggled with having turned a blind eye to abusive conduct (in the case of Huw Edwards, the newsreader convicted of possessing indecent images of minors), an impending court case on grounds of alleged rape and assault due to come to court imminently (against the former BBC Radio One DJ Tim Westwood), alleged sexual assault charges (against Russell Brand) and allegations of misconduct (Masterchef’s Greg Wallace).
Its claim to stand for “due impartiality”, however, has faced a storm of criticism, not least over a Gaza documentary featuring a child narrator who turned out to be the son of a Hamas official, and the subsequent maladroit handling. Turness, as chief of news, appeared slow to grasp the seriousness of the matter, equivocating on the structures of Hamas, a designated terrorist organisation, and dragging her feet on the wording of an apology.
Add to that the structural challenges of audiences heading off to streaming services (the BBC announced a major deal with YouTube this week) and a sense that the BBC can end up in a placid groupthink when it comes to reflecting major social and political changes, and finding the new person to helm it all looks daunting.
But just as MPs dream of becoming Prime Minister, the race for the coveted office in New Broadcasting House is heating up (inheriting “the Tim hipster look”, Davie has a taste for open plan desks and a shag pile rug – is, as one executive puts it drily, “optional”).
To start with, the most talked-about contenders, Jay Hunt, a former head of content now heading Apple TV in Europe, is the most discussed candidate – not least because she brings experience of a senior role and the challenge of the streaming services. But also, the “soft skill” required in the job is communication and Hunt, a glossy figure who is also overseeing a revamp of the Hay Festival, can project a confidence the organisation badly needs.
The only downsides former colleagues cite are that she is a bit “BBC marmite” in leadership style, verging on the “bossy” and “sharp”. But that might well say more about the Beeb’s previous attitudes to female leadership styles. “If they want someone like the old female execs in long brown skirts and Gordon Brown-ish politics,” says one former senior figure. “Jay’s clearly not that – she is a modern, tough executive.”
She can, however, be sensitive to criticism and scrutiny, which would inevitably come with the job. Odds are nonetheless strong – and as a family friend points out: “She hasn’t said she won’t, which means she might!”
Hunt has a natural peer competitor in Alex Mahon, who has just left Channel 4 as chief executive for the private sector, and who many regard as the smartest intellectual candidate for the role. That is often an underweighted aspect of BBC leadership.
One reason the organisation has struggled in making fraught calls about editorial content is a tendency to be comfortable with whatever the status quo is at any time. The BBC often struggles to come to terms with some of the sweeping changes it is reporting on – be it on changing attitudes to immigration, a confused response to Brexit and now in the botched Trump edit, it sometimes does not grasp well enough the risks and calculations needed at the top to avoid disasters at the same time as rightly defending robust and independent coverage.
Former BBC chief content officer Charlotte Moore was deemed to be the internal candidate best placed to replace Davie (Photo: David Parry Media Assignments/PA)The crucial financial context of this race is the start of talks to renew its charter. The current one is up at the end of next year. This is seen as a priority to secure its future funding when there are growing challenges to the licence fee model. Mahon’s experience in heading off a privatisation threat by the last government by assembling a powerful coalition of influential views against it is a strong calling card. Knowing which fights to get into – and how to get out of them is a major credential.
Had things not gone quite so awry in a number of scandals over the past couple of years, Charlotte Moore, a poised figure and ex-BBC content boss who oversaw investment in hits like the history-meets-crime drama Peaky Blinders and the mega success of The Traitors, shows her nose for deals with top external production and talent. Hunt can parry her own flair in commissioning Slow Horses and Sherlock.
Moore was deemed to be the internal candidate best placed to replace Davie. But she also showed her distaste for internal arguments about direction and the travails of impartiality conflicts – leaving to head up a company which produced The Crown and other dramas, which may be where her creative heart lies. One executive producer who worked with her says, “Why would she come back to a bear pit about Gaza, Trump and Reform UK coverage when she didn’t relish any of that before?” Added to which, those in the frame in external roles are paid more than they would be as director general.
Certainly, the BBC will be pleased there are also more women than men in the running – partly because the prospect of a first female director general is a milestone it would like to pass after a century of blokes at the helm. Patrick Holland, a former BBC executive who has run factual programmes as well as arts and who now heads up Banerjee, a major global production outfit, has fans for “good judgement and not getting in a flap”, as one colleague puts it. Jane Turton at All3Media is another all-rounder in drama and major entertainment production.
Ideas of bringing in the most senior executive from outside media or at least outside broadcasting float around – Nicola Mendelsohn, global head of business for Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, has been floated. John Micklethwait, the media chief of Bloomberg, is thought by friends to be more intrigued by the chairmanship role in a future life.
But as one executive in the midst of one of the BBC’s many internal dramas put it, “It’s news that kills you in the end” – meaning the handling of news and current events coverage. With Davie and Turness’s abrupt departures in mind and expensive court dealings now underway to attempt to halt the Trump claim for damages, plus the Gaza documentary fallout, which has resulted in yet another internal change to the current affairs “org chart”, the likelihood is that the top job goes to someone with key editorial experience.
The key question for any contender must be who should head up the vast empire of BBC News and political coverage. One erstwhile senior player in that world says that the Corporation has “a large body and a small head” – meaning that it has a lot of good or fairly good journalists and editors, but not enough really outstanding or agile thinkers who think out of the box or challenge the status quo.
One major danger of the race being conducted in the wake of arguments over heated topics is that the bigger picture is lost. Caryn Mandabach, the veteran Hollywood figure who was executive producer of Peaky Blinders, thinks the BBC has a blind spot about its future: “The streamers have totally taken over: the war is over. The BBC lacks advertising revenue for wide programming. They don’t have the money to compete globally, so everything will have to be cheap and locally focused, so there will be nothing like Peaky [Blinders] ever again. Added to which no one under 50 even owns a TV, and if they do, it is watched to view YouTube.”
A declining BBC, she predicts, will end up “providing cheap product for old people”. Avoiding that fate by keeping it relevant in a burgeoning global context race, while somehow steering declaredly impartial news coverage when audiences are moving deeper into their own grooves, aversions and comfort zones is the real job description.
And yes, it is daunting and disaster-prone. But it is still the director general of a raggle-taggle but vital media army, which is why someone, in the end, is out there hankering for the call.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor at POLITICO and host of “Politics at Sam and Anne’s” podcast
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