Why the pundits got the Huw Edwards story so wrong

Huw Edwards has pleaded guilty to three sexual offences, after being found in possession of indecent images of children. The details turn the stomach. Between December 2020 and August 2021, the face of BBC News – its top anchor for decades – was in a depraved WhatsApp conversation with a since-convicted paedophile. Alex Williams, from Merthyr Tydfil in Wales, sent Edwards 377 sexual images, of which 41 were indecent images of children. One child depicted was as young as seven. Seven of the images were so-called Category A, the worst kind, depicting ‘penetrative sexual activity’. Edwards will be sentenced in September.

Questions are now being levelled at BBC management – about what the corporation knew and when, and why taxpayer-funded cash continued to flow Edwards’s way. According to a statement, the BBC learned of the police investigation into Edwards – which only became public this week – last November. At that point, he had already been suspended in relation to different, non-criminal allegations of misconduct, but was still employed, on full pay, until he formally left the BBC – supposedly on ‘medical advice’ – in April this year. Culture secretary Lisa Nandy is reportedly set to meet with the BBC today.

It’s also worth asking a few questions, I think, of the pundits who so vigorously leapt to Edwards’s defence when those separate, non-criminal allegations were made last summer. While no one knew then what we know now, there was still a startling lack of curiosity about those early revelations, and a concerted effort to shame the newspaper that uncovered them. The Sun began reporting in July last year that an unnamed BBC presenter – later revealed to be Edwards – had allegedly paid a troubled 17-year-old more than £35,000 in exchange for explicit images. According to the teen’s parents, the cash was being used to fund a nasty crack habit. The case was deeply seedy, but not criminal, allowing much of the liberal-left commentariat to blithely dismiss it as a purely private matter. The Sun’s pursuit of these revelations – as well as other allegations, some of them from within the BBC – was presented as another tabloid witch-hunt.

After Edwards admitted that he was the shamed presenter, and checked himself into hospital on mental-health grounds, BBC man turned podcaster Jon Sopel fulminated against the Sun. ‘There are a number of people in the tabloid press’, he told Good Morning Britain, ‘who need to give themselves a good, hard look in the mirror’. He was furious with BBC management, too, for throwing his old friend under the bus. Guardian columnist Owen Jones, for his part, called the Sun a ‘disgusting rag’ that had ‘driven a vulnerable man into medical care’. ‘They have to pay for what they’ve done to Huw Edwards’, he thundered. That tweet has now been issued with the mother of all community notes.

These pundits can hardly be criticised for their lack of clairvoyance. The investigation that brought Edwards to justice hadn’t even begun when Sopel, Jones and Co issued those spluttering statements. But the speed with which they dismissed the original sordid claims as little more than one man’s ‘complicated’ private life was stunning. Apparently, the nation’s most prominent news man using his taxpayer-provided wealth to purchase explicit images from a crack-addled teenager was a big, fat nothingburger. None of our business. Not in the ‘public interest’. This was all about the nastiness of the tabloids and their vendetta against poor, old Auntie.

As is so often the case, the great and good were guilty of the very same failing they were laying at the door of their opponents. They allowed their hatred for the right-wing tabloids and / or their tribal loyalty to a supposedly more respectable, metropolitan journalist to cloud their journalistic and moral judgement. The red tops gave them the red mist and they ditched their erstwhile principles. When #MeToo first hit Westminster, Tory MPs were shamed and hauled over the coals by the commentariat for as little as a fleeting hand on a knee. Owen Jones spends much of his time trying to get people sacked for things they say, modern-day Mary Whitehouse that he is. And yet the suggestion that Edwards might face some blowback for the unseemly things he had allegedly done was apparently wrong and outrageous and absurd.

To quote the self-righteous Sopel, spitting feathers on TV this time last year, perhaps Team Huw all need to ‘give themselves a good, hard look in the mirror’.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_