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Latest 24 November 2025
Tim Davie misled audience about the BBC’s supposed leftwing agenda
Leon Neal / Getty Images
Speaking at a book festival, the former director general suggested the BBC newsroom was full of BLM T-shirts and Kamala mugs. But that’s fake news.
The former BBC director general Tim Davie misled the public in suggesting BBC news reporters had a leftwing political agenda, Good Law Project can reveal.
Speaking at the Cheltenham Literary Festival last month, Davie claimed the BBC stood against racism but it was “not appropriate for a journalist who may be covering that issue to be campaigning in that way”.
“You cannot have any assumption about where people are politically.” Davie said. “You leave it at the door, and your religion is journalism in the BBC. And I tell you: the problem I’ve got is people react quite chemically to that. So you can’t come into the newsroom with a Black Lives Matter T-shirt on.”
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And he continued, “I feel very, very strongly that if you walk into the BBC newsroom, you cannot be holding a Kamala Harris mug when you come to the election – no way, that’s not even acceptable.”
Following his comments, Good Law Project made a Freedom of Information Act request to the BBC. What records did it hold of “BBC journalists or staff wearing Black Lives Matter T-shirts or other clothing with this phrase (or similar) in the newsroom” and “How many instances have been reported to the BBC of BBC journalists or staff carrying ‘Kamala’ items or merchandise in the newsroom?”
The BBC said it held no recorded instances of either type of conduct.
According to Good Law Project’s director, Jo Maugham, this response raises important questions.
“If you listened to the former director general you would have formed the impression that the BBC newsroom is a hotbed of lefty insurrectionists,” Maugham said. “This analysis will have surprised anyone who has listened to Radio 4 sneering at trans women and soft-peddling the Israeli genocide in Palestine. And what we now know is that, surprise surprise, there is no evidence to support his comments.”
A number of senior BBC and former BBC figures – including its chair and the right-leaning political adviser Michael Prescott – are today appearing in parliament before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee to answer questions about its political biases.
The BBC declined to comment.