A teenage boy who accused Scott Mills of serious sexual offences in the 1990s may have been inspired to speak out due to the new Huw Edwards docu-drama, it is being rumoured within the corporation.
Last night the Daily Mirror linked the decision to fire Mills to a 2016 police investigation into ‘serious sexual offences’ against a teenage boy between 1997 and 2000.
Scotland Yard has confirmed the CPS rejected the case due to a lack of evidence and the investigation was closed in 2019.
Mills joined BBC Radio 1 in 1998 from Heart 106.2, where he started in 1995 after working in local radio. He left the BBC after 28 years yesterday.
The BBC is refusing to say why he was sacked other than that it was related to his ‘personal conduct’ and the corporation is now under pressure to explain what they knew about Mills’ brush with police and when.
Two sources have said that within the BBC it is being claimed that the complainant may have gone to the corporation due to the huge publicity surrounding Martin Clunes as Huw Edwards in Power: The Downfall Of Huw Edwards, which aired on Channel 5 last week.
One BBC executive in London told the Daily Mail today that there’s a real belief amongst bosses at the corporation that the timing of Mills’ sacking and the Edwards drama was ‘not a coincidence’.
‘The Huw Edwards drama showed that there could be a reckoning’, they said.
Radio 2 Breakfast Show host Scott Mills, pictured in November, was hauled off air last Tuesday and his contract has now been terminated over his ‘personal conduct’
Martin Clunes in Power: The Downfall Of Huw Edwards (pictured), which aired on Channel 5 on Tuesday evening – the day Mills was suspended
Another senior broadcaster at the BBC added that this claim that the Edwards drama was the ‘spark’ is swirling around Broadcasting House.
The BBC declined to comment on the claims.
Last night the Daily Mirror reported the decision to fire Mills came after a 2016 police investigation into ‘serious sexual offences’ against a teenage boy.
The BBC declined to comment on why he was not suspended or sacked at the time and why they have fired him almost a decade later.
Former police officer turned investigative journalist Mark Williams-Thomas has said that police sources have confirmed to him that Scott Mills was interviewed by the Met in 2018 – in a spin-off investigation from Operation Yewtree.
Mr Williams-Thomas helped expose Jimmy Savile and his work led to Operation Yewtree, the police investigation against Savile and others including Rolf Harris.
He said today: ‘The police were swamped with allegations post Savile documentary and as a result it let to high profile stars being named [by complainants], one of these was Scott Mills.
‘He wasn’t charged – but was allowed to continue working’.
Another senior broadcaster at the BBC has said there is ‘total shock’ at the corporation after Mills’s sacking.
There were apparently ‘audible gasps’ from staff as they were told on Monday morning in an email from BBC director of music Lorna Clarke.
Several stars who have spent time with him described him as ‘kind and generous’ and that friends are ‘devastated’ for him.
He was also described by a radio colleague as ‘hugely popular’ internally.
‘It is not like the BBC to act so fast’, a household name broadcaster told the Daily Mail.
Another source claimed that wild rumours are flying around Broadcasting House about the reason for his sacking.
‘No suspension period or prolonged investigation does not bode well’, another insider said.
The BBC was plunged into fresh scandal yesterday as one of its most high-profile radio stars was sensationally axed.
Radio 2 Breakfast Show host Scott Mills was hauled off air last Tuesday and his contract has now been terminated over his ‘personal conduct’.
The allegations against Mills, 53, are thought to date back a decade to his time on Radio 1, with reports suggesting they involve a ‘historic relationship’.
One of the Corporation’s highest-paid stars, who earned up to £360,000 a year, Mills’s departure has caused ‘absolute chaos’ at Radio 2, insiders told the Daily Mail, with colleagues ‘in shock’ and bosses scrambling to find a replacement.
Last night the Daily Mirror reported the decision to fire Mills came after a 2016 police investigation into ‘serious sexual offences’ against a teenage boy.
It claimed the DJ was questioned at the time but the case was dropped due to a lack of evidence. The newspaper alleged his sacking related to the same individual.
Mills is the latest in a string of stars to lose their jobs at the scandal-ridden BBC. His ousting follows the exit of news anchor Huw Edwards, along with MasterChef pair Gregg Wallace and John Torode, in the past two years.
It is believed the unceremonious firing, announced with a curt public statement yesterday morning, was one of the last acts of director-general Tim Davie, who wanted to ‘clear the decks’ before leaving his post on Thursday.
Mr Davie, who himself resigned after it emerged that footage of a speech made by US President Donald Trump had been edited and spliced together in an episode of Panorama, wanted one last roll of the dice, an insider said.
Mills took over the flagship breakfast show from Zoe Ball in 2025. The allegations against Mills are thought to date back a decade to his time on Radio 1
But he will be leaving interim director-general Rhodri Talfan Davies, and permanent replacement Matt Brittin, with a major headache as the race is on to find a replacement for Mills or risk losing listeners.
The biggest breakfast show in the country currently brings in a weekly audience of some 6.5million, after listeners lost under Mills’s predecessor Zoe Ball returned.
Mills’s team are said to be taking legal advice in the wake of his sacking.
Last night, a Metropolitan Police spokesman said: ‘In December 2016, the Met began an investigation following a referral from another police force. The investigation related to allegations of serious sexual offences against a teenage boy. These were reported to taken place between 1997 and 2000.
‘As part of these inquiries, a man who was in his 40s at the time of the interview, was questioned by police under caution in July 2018.
‘A full file of evidence was submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service, who determined the evidential threshold had not been met to bring charges. Following this advice, the investigation was closed in May 2019.’
A representative for Mills declined to comment when approached by the Daily Mail.
In an internal note to staff yesterday morning, Lorna Clarke, the Corporation’s director of music, said: ‘I wanted to personally let you know that Scott Mills has left the Breakfast Show, and the BBC. I know that this news will be sudden and unexpected and therefore must come as a shock.
‘Not least as so many of us have worked with Scott over a great many years, across a broad range of our programmes on Radio 1, Radio 5 Live, Radio 2 and TV. I felt it was important to share this news with you at the earliest opportunity.’
She said it would ‘come as a shock to our audience and loyal breakfast show listeners too’ as she promised to update everyone with ‘more information on plans for the show when I’m able to’.
She added: ‘While I appreciate many of you will have questions, I hope you can understand that I am not going to be saying anything further now.’
In a statement, the BBC said: ‘While we do not comment on matters relating to individuals, we can confirm Scott Mills is no longer contracted to work with the BBC.’
Mills married his long-term partner Sam Vaughan at a celebrity-studded wedding in Barcelona in 2024. They are pictured with their dog
Mills’s final show aired last Tuesday – following his presenting stint on BBC’s Comic Relief the previous Friday – and he signed off by telling listeners: ‘See you tomorrow.’ Just six days later, Mills was gone from the job.
‘People are walking around crying,’ said one BBC employee. ‘The BBC has taken this very seriously.’
Mills landed the coveted Radio 2 Breakfast Show role in January last year when he took over from Ms Ball.
But it was at the more free-wheeling Radio 1, aimed at a younger demographic, where Mills made his name, rising through the ranks from the early breakfast show in 1998 to the afternoon slot vacated by Sara Cox in 2004.
Renamed The Scott Mills Show, it ran from 2004 until 2022, when Mills jumped ship to Radio 2, where he replaced Steve Wright on his afternoon slot.
Now married to long-term partner Sam Vaughan, 36, Mills enjoyed a hedonistic lifestyle during his 24-year tenure at Radio 1.
‘This relates back to the culture at Radio 1, not at Radio 2,’ the BBC source told the Mail of the allegation made against Mills. Radio 2 presenter Jeremy Vine said he’d been unaware of his colleague’s departure until just minutes before he went on air yesterday.
‘I had not heard anything about it until 17 minutes ago, when it was on the BBC website, and I only had the information that was given to you in the bulletin,’ he told listeners to his own show after the 12pm news led with the sacking.
‘I have nothing more [to say than] it was allegations about Scott Mills’s personal conduct which have led to him being sacked.’
BBC news correspondent Sima Kotecha told how ‘gasps filled the newsroom’ when the news was announced to staff.
She said: ‘This is mega news. We heard gasps in the newsroom when people realised that he had been sacked… The fact that the bosses had to do this means there must be something potentially very significant here to let one of their big names go. As I said, this is a huge name in the BBC.’
It was during his two decades at Radio 1 that Southampton-born Mills struggled with alcohol and suffered from anxiety and depression. His spiral was prompted by the death of his boyfriend from a drug overdose in 2001.
He credited BBC bosses for standing by him and even admitted that he should have been ‘sacked’ due to his behaviour.
‘I was 26 [when he died] and we spent every minute together, it was truly awful,’ he said in 2012.
‘[I’d] wake up at 2.30am, do the show, come home and go back to sleep. Then I’d wake up in the evening and drink two bottles of wine or a bottle of spirits in front of the TV. It was a way to escape.’
Mills said ‘even I would’ve sacked me’, adding: ‘Thank God for Radio 1.’
In recent years, Mills has found stability with husband Sam, whom he met in 2016. The couple appeared together on, and won, BBC’s reality show Celebrity Race Across the World in 2024. They got married in Barcelona shortly after filming. Mills was one of the BBC’s Eurovision commentators and, in 2022, raised £1million for the charity Children in Need by spending 24 hours on a treadmill.
Mills’s exit comes in the same week as Mr Davie’s departure from the Corporation, with the BBC’s director of nations Mr Davies stepping in as interim chief.
Former Google executive Mr Brittin, who spent 18 years with the tech giant, will take over the top job on May 18. The beleaguered BBC is still dealing with the fallout of the Huw Edwards scandal, with renewed focus on the convicted sex offender thanks to Channel 5’s recent documentary-drama starring Martin Clunes.
Edwards was suspended on full pay from the Corporation while an internal investigation was carried out and before he quit the job.
He was later given a six-month suspended jail sentence for possessing child abuse images.
