A stickler for impartiality or the leader of a “right-wing cabal” at the heart of the BBC? A bulwark against “woke groupthink” or an “active agent of the Tory party”? These are just some of the labels that have been levelled at Sir Robbie Gibb in recent years – and now these contradictions in his position at the BBC seem to be near breaking point.
If Gibb’s name is unfamiliar to you, that’s probably because his roles – be it as a Tory spin doctor, news programme editor or a BBC board member – tend to be behind the scenes in media and politics, the two fields he has spent his career hopping between. But in the wake of two high-profile resignations at the BBC following a controversy over the editing of a Panorama documentary about Donald Trump, Gibb has become the story in his own right.
Last week, The Telegraph published details of a leaked BBC memo written by former standards advisor Michael Prescott, which raised concerns about the way clips of a Trump speech had been spliced together in a Panorama programme. Two of the corporation’s most senior figures, director-general Tim Davie and BBC News chief executive Deborah Turness, resigned a few days later. Behind the scenes, it was reported that Gibb, reportedly a friend of Prescott, had “led the charge” in a board meeting discussing the memo.
The current turmoil at the BBC has raised serious questions about the impartiality of Gibb, a former director of communications for Theresa May, and whether there may, in fact, be a double standard at play. Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey has called for him to be ousted from the BBC board, claiming that he “should have no role in appointing the new director general”. Scotland’s first minister John Swinney, meanwhile, described his position as “untenable”. Alan Rusbridger, who writes for The Independent, has for months been chronicling how Gibb led the mystery consortium to buy The Jewish Chronicle on behalf of a secret backer whose identity has never been revealed. His stewardship of that paper saw it mired in a number of its own ethical and editorial failings.
So who is the man at the heart of a tangled web of politics and media interests?
Gibb grew up in Leeds and Wakefield, and was involved in conservative politics as a student. Around this time, he and his brother Nick, a future Tory MP and schools minister, briefly lived out what sounds like a discarded John le Carré storyline. As part of the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists, an anti-Communist group, they headed to the Soviet Union, posing as tourists on package trips, and brought documents, money and medicines along with them. They would return with uncensored books and articles written by critics of the regime, with the aim of exposing what life was actually like behind the iron curtain.
Recalling a “courier” trip to Moscow in 1985 in The Telegraph, Gibb described how he smuggled more than 100 letters into Russia in a pair of baggy khaki trousers, then ran the taps in his hotel bathroom while unpacking them, to ensure that KGB bugs couldn’t pick up any sounds. “This sort of direct action as a conservative student is rare – it’s usually the preserve of the left – so I think we all felt what we were doing was both incredibly important but also, frankly, a lot of fun,” he told the paper. “It’s the naivety of youth, I suppose, but we didn’t worry about what could happen.”
After this brief foray into the covert world, Gibb’s career took a more conventional turn. After graduating from Royal Holloway with a degree in economics and public administration, he joined the BBC in the 90s as a political researcher. Sean O’Grady, The Independent’s associate editor, worked alongside him in the political research unit, providing data for political programmes. “He’s got a very acute intelligence, which means that he can cut through and really get to the heart of something very quickly, and that’s a rare talent,” O’Grady says.
He was always open about his right-wing political beliefs, O’Grady adds, remembering him as “a libertarian tory” and “a big fan of Mrs Thatcher” (indeed, Gibb has previously described himself as “a proper Thatcherite conservative”) who moved in conservative circles. Gibb really enjoyed a good debate, a good argument, but “he was always respectful with it, and good humoured”, says O’Grady.
A few years later, he would swap the media for politics. In 1997, Gibb left the corporation to become the chief of staff for Tory shadow chancellor Francis Maude, and later supported Maude in backing Michael Portillo’s unsuccessful Conservative Party leadership run. But shortly after Portillo’s campaign failed, Gibb made the unusual decision to return to journalism and headed back to the BBC, this time as the deputy editor of Newsnight.
He then oversaw programmes including Daily Politics, This Week and The Andrew Marr Show, and would eventually become head of BBC Westminster; he was also the corporation’s editor of live political programmes during the EU referendum. About a year after the Brexit vote, though, in July 2017, Gibb jumped ship again, this time to take up a position as Theresa May’s director of communications. His appointment came at a tumultuous time for the then-PM, who had just squandered the Tory party’s majority in the general election.
As May’s spin doctor, he faced the (unenviable, to most) task of keeping the public on side as the government attempted to steer Britain out of the EU. He didn’t have to feign enthusiasm. Gibb, for his part, is a devoted Brexiteer; in 2019, shortly after May delivered a poorly received speech blaming squabbling MPs for the delays to Brexit, a report in the Evening Standard claimed that Gibb was “messianic” in his Euroscepticism and even suggested that “his loyalty to Brexit is stronger than to May”.
When May left Downing Street in 2019, Gibb left too, and took up a PR role at Kekst CNC, a strategic communications firm, and also advised GB News in the early stages of the right-wing channel’s development.
The following year, he took aim at the BBC in a column published in The Telegraph, claiming that the corporation had “been culturally captured by the woke-dominated groupthink of some of its own staff”, suggesting that “there is a default left-leaning attitude from a metropolitan workforce mostly drawn from a similar social and economic background”. He singled out Lewis Goodall, then Newsnight’s policy editor, to criticise his use of social media, which Gibb claimed amounted to “flagrant breaches of the BBC’s impartiality rules”.
Not long after this attack, Gibb would be back in the BBC fold – and that Telegraph article would serve as a pretty good indicator of what his priorities would be. In 2021, he was appointed as a non-executive member of the BBC board by Boris Johnson (five members of the board are selected by the government) and was seen very much as “Boris’s man” on the inside.
“The corporation has a big job to reform and make sure it once again becomes the gold standard for broadcasting impartiality,” Gibb said at the time. “I am privileged to have the chance to play a part in helping the BBC achieve that.”
Gibb’s appointment inevitably raised eyebrows; parachuting a former Downing Street spin doctor into the BBC board so soon after their departure from politics was a rare move. “The rules clearly state that political activity should not be a bar to appointment,” a Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport statement said at the time.
Later that year came an initial indicator of just how prepared Gibb would be to intervene in decisions he seemingly disagreed with. In July, the Financial Times reported that he had sought to block the appointment of former HuffPost UK editor Jess Brammar as the BBC’s executive news director. The paper claimed that he had sent a text stating that the government’s “fragile trust in the BBC will be shattered” if Brammar got the job; his concerns were apparently linked to Brammar’s handling of a dispute with Kemi Badenoch (a source close to Gibb denied that he sent a message featuring the words attributed to him).
Brammar was eventually hired, but Gibb’s apparent crusade did not end there. In 2022, former Newsnight host Emily Maitlis used her MacTaggart memorial lecture, a prestigious speech delivered at the Edinburgh TV Festival, to take aim at Gibb as an “active agent of the Conservative Party – former Downing Street spin doctor and former adviser to BBC rival GB News” who now acts “as the arbiter of BBC impartiality”. The BBC’s then-director Richard Sharp insisted that Maitlis’s claim was “completely wrong” and stressed that Gibb “does not operate on the board as an agent of the Conservative Party”.
Then, in December 2022, a headline in the New Statesman posed the question: “Is Robbie Gibb out of control at the BBC?” The accompanying article recounted a meeting with Newsnight staffers, in which he took them to task on impartiality. “Anyone that lets their colleagues down by social media bias, by revealing their preferences, having agendas, is objectively anti-BBC in my view,” he reportedly told them, before inviting anyone who did so to “get stuffed and leave”.
His position at The Jewish Chronicle then started to emerge as another confounding string to Gibb’s bow. In 2020, Gibb led a consortium that bought out the paper, saving it from liquidation. In 2023, the BBC Declaration of Personal Interests listed him as the 100 per cent owner of the publication. Writing for The Independent last year, Alan Rusbridger suggested that “Gibb himself doesn’t appear to have the kind of money that was needed to rescue the JC” and questioned whether he was acting as “the frontman” for other, undisclosed backers. Gibb eventually stepped down from his role in August 2024.
How does this all come to bear on his position at the BBC? The war in Gaza is currently one of the most contentious issues when it comes to the broadcaster’s reporting and impartiality. The Jewish Chronicle, meanwhile, tends to take a staunchly pro-Israel stance; last year, the publication had to remove a series of articles about the war in Gaza from its website amid claims that the author had fabricated some material.
Gibb’s critics, therefore, suggest that his links to the JC should preclude him from making calls on editorial neutrality. “I can’t see how he can possibly sit on that committee and portray himself as a beacon of impartiality, sitting in judgement on BBC journalists,” Rusbridger has told LBC; writing in Prospect, the magazine he now edits, he also described Gibb as part of a “right wing cabal” that is “waging war on the principles that made our public broadcaster great”. In Gibb’s defence, veteran BBC broadcaster Andrew Neil has pointed out there had been many left-wing appointees to the BBC board over the years and suggested there was not “a scintilla of evidence” to show Gibb has ever done anything to undermine the BBC’s impartiality.
However, in July this year, 400 media figures, including 111 anonymous BBC staffers, were so concerned, they urged the corporation’s board to remove Gibb. “We believe the role of Robbie Gibb, both on the board and as part of the editorial standards committee, is untenable,” the petition read. “We call on the BBC to do better for our audiences and recommit to our values of impartiality, honesty and reporting without fear or favour.”
Now Gibb’s position and power at the BBC is under new scrutiny. The row over Panorama and the leaked memo, which took the corporation to task on impartiality, is putting a new light on his own links and interests. The growing storm clouds certainly indicate there may be more to come.
