CAROLINE Dinenage, chair of the Commons Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Select Committee – the parliamentary body charged with scrutinising and potentially disciplining the BBC – this week issued one of the most severe letters the Corporation has received in decades.
It follows the appearance before the committee on November 11 of BBC chairman Samir Shah, an appearance which, it is now absolutely clear, left MPs deeply dissatisfied, unconvinced, and in parts openly alarmed. He is in deep, deep trouble.
Shah’s limp testimony was meant to draw a line under the scandal unleashed by the BBC former independent editorial adviser Michael Prescott’s dossier revealing that Panorama doctored a Donald Trump speech – giving the impression that he was calling directly for violence – and that senior BBC news executives knew for six months and did nothing.
Instead, the committee found Shah’s explanations incomplete, contradictory and evasive. The result is Dinenage’s extraordinary follow-up letter, demanding a full written account because the oral evidence on November 11 failed to answer fundamental questions about how and why the BBC board failed to act.
Her letter asks, in surgical detail, why the board took no meaningful steps when the Prescott memo first surfaced; why different BBC executives have given different accounts of who knew about the doctored clip and when; why director of news Deborah Turness was effectively pushed out; why Director General Tim Davie’s resignation was not anticipated or wanted by Shah; and why internal BBC decision-making appears chaotic, informal, and potentially in breach of governance procedures. In plain English, the committee did not believe, or was not satisfied with, what the Corporation chairman told them.
This is Parliament saying bluntly: your testimony was not good enough, your version of events does not add up, reflecting a strong suspicion of evasion of the truth.
The tone of the letter is – as far as can be checked – unprecedented. DCMS select committees do not normally challenge the BBC’s leadership with such bluntness unless they believe they have been misled. Dinenage is effectively giving Shah one final chance: explain the discrepancies, disclose the documents, or face severe consequences. The letter reads like the start of a formal investigation.
This must be seen, of course, within the wider context of the BBC’s long-standing culture of denial. For decades the Corporation has responded to scandal by minimising, delaying, concealing and self-exonerating.
The Bashir-Diana affair was not a single deception but a 25-year institutional cover-up. The Savile scandal was denied until the evidence was overwhelming. Misreporting of Gaza, Brexit, climate change and immigration has followed the same pattern: deny wrongdoing, dismiss critics, and retreat behind the familiar mantra of ‘editorial independence’.
The Panorama-Trump affair has exposed that nothing has changed. A cornerstone programme of the BBC’s flagship investigative brand manipulated political content; senior executives knew; the board did nothing; and the leadership attempted to contain the scandal until the Daily Telegraph’s publication of the Prescott dossier blew it wide open.
When Shah appeared before the DCMS committee MPs expected contrition, transparency and decisive explanations. Instead, they encountered confused timelines, inconsistent accounts, and an evident reluctance to admit that governance had collapsed on his watch. Dinenage’s letter is the result: Parliament is no longer prepared to accept platitudes and partial disclosures.
Her demand for documents, internal communications, board minutes, and the Johnston note on Prescott is devastating because it implicitly accuses the BBC of withholding material information. Her insistence that Shah explain why he believed Turness’s forced resignation would ‘bring the crisis to an end’ reveals that the committee thinks the BBC has been attempting a classic ‘limited hangout’: sacrifice one figure, avoid systemic accountability, move on.
This time, Parliament is not buying it.
The timing could not be worse for the BBC. As the start of discussions about the 2027 Royal Charter looms, the Corporation is leaderless, its governance questioned, and its credibility shredded. No Director General. A disgraced head of news. A fractious board. A chairman on the defensive. And now a select committee signalling – in the most public way possible – that it no longer trusts the BBC to tell the truth about itself.
This moment feels different because it is different. Has the complacent political class governing Britain finally understood that the BBC’s scandals are not isolated missteps but symptoms of a deeper institutional failure?
The culture of concealment is not accidental; it is structural. It arises from a broadcaster which regulates itself, investigates itself, and funds itself through a coercive tax that insulates it from public accountability.
The select committee’s letter is therefore more than a reprimand. It is an inflection point. For the first time in a generation, it seems that Parliament might be prepared to contemplate what the country has known for years: that the BBC cannot reform itself and must no longer be allowed to police its own partiality, its own honesty, or its own failures.
The BBC is out of excuses. Will the BBC Charter review finally deliver the reckoning the Corporation has spent decades avoiding? Don’t hold your breath. Under this lying government nothing can be guaranteed.
