Emily Maitlis has a strong track record as an interviewer and reporter, most notably on BBC Two’s Newsnight, from which she departed a few months ago. Now she has used British broadcasting’s biggest industry event to turn the spotlight on her former employer and its attempts to observe impartiality – as the Royal Charter that is its constitution demands.
The corporation’s director-general, Tim Davie, has committed himself to placing impartiality at the heart of the BBC, but has at various times bumped up against the natural human tendency of journalists like Maitlis to call events as they see them.
Maitlis is the latest television luminary to give the James MacTaggart memorial lecture – the keynote address at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, where my own turn was 31 years ago. She gave an extended and somewhat aggrieved account of the most notorious of these impartiality collisions: Dominic Cummings’ flight to Durham during the COVID lockdown, and her clear belief that he had thereby broken lockdown rules. After protests from 10 Downing Street, the BBC reprimanded her, much to her irritation. Her departure will not have caused Davie any sleepless nights.
