Under fire BBC chairman Samir Shah was dealt a fresh blow as parliament’s culture committee chief questioned his leadership.
Dame Caroline Dinenage criticised Mr Shah’s performance in front of the Commons committee on Monday arguing it had been ’wishy-washy’ and he had not win the confidence of MPs.
She questioned whether the BBC board was in ‘safe hands’ after his handling of the fallout over an internal BBC report on impartiality which resulted in the resignations of director-general Tim Davie and news chief Deborah Turness.
Mr Shah, 73, told MPs he was going to ‘steady the ship and put it on an even keel’ and insisted he would not ‘walk away’ from the job.
But Ms Dinenage, the chairwoman of the culture committee, told the BBC’s The World Tonight after the hearing she was concerned about ‘chaos at the heart of the BBC board’.
She added: ‘I don’t think as a committee we were wildly enthused that the board is in safe hands.’
The MP said the committee had asked Mr Shah why it had taken so long for the BBC to apologise for Panorama’s misleading edit of a Donald Trump speech, which has led to threats of a $5 billion lawsuit from the US president.
She said: ‘It was quite difficult to get a straight answer to those questions.’
Under fire BBC chairman Samir Shah was dealt a fresh blow as parliament’s culture committee chief questioned his leadership
Asked if Mr Shah was the right person to grip the BBC’s problems, Dame Caroline replied: ‘Well, he didn’t really have direct answers on the questions of to get the BBC to act quicker, to act more decisively.
‘Then there are more systemic issues beyond that and we were really looking for hard evidence that the BBC board were going to grip this. I’m not entirely convinced that they can and that they will.’
She was pressed further on his future and where it left the embattled chairman, she said: ‘It’s a very difficult position, isn’t it, because the BBC can’t be left without a director-general and without a chair. Someone needs to be there to lead the march to replace the leadership.
‘But equally I don’t think, as a committee, we were wildly enthused that the board is in safe hands.
‘We’re going to need to see a lot more robust answers to questions like the ones we were posing. Everything was very wishy-washy. There wasn’t a huge sense that there was grip at the heart of BBC governance.’
But she made clear that replacing Mr Shah following the appointment of a new director-general would be a matter for Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary.
Mr Shah, who was previously a television executive, was appointed as BBC chairman by Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government in 2024 for a four-year term.
In his role, he receives a salary of £160,000 per year.
Yesterday, OfCom head Dame Melanie Dawes said there were ‘serious issues recently with editorial decision making’ at the corporation. Speaking to BBC Breakfast, she said: ‘The board has a lot to do to set that right.’
Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative leader, also criticised Mr Shah’s performance. He said: ‘The chairman of the board is straddling two peculiar stools: “nothing to see, guv”, and “there are problems but no one was to blame”.
‘He got a hard time from the committee and didn’t emerge out of it as a chairman who was very in control. He’ll have to think very hard about whether this is a job for him.’
On Monday, the BBC chairman delivered an apology over the fiasco and said he was concentrating on the search for the next director-general.
Shah also defended outgoing director-general Tim Davie and said he should not have resigned
He also defended outgoing director-general Tim Davie and said he should not have resigned.
Mr Shah said he ‘spent a great deal of time’ trying to dissuade the BBC boss from quitting from the post after the corporation became engulfed in crisis over an edited Donald Trump speech.
An internal BBC memo showed how Panorama had edited a speech by the President to make it look like he had called for violence during the January 6, 2021 riots at the US Capitol in Washington DC, but the BBC did not apologise for the error until the report was leaked.
Mr Trump has since threatened to sue the corporation for up to $5 billion (£3.8 billion), and Mr Davie and Ms Turness resigned.
Mr Shah told MPs on Parliament’s culture, media and sport committee he disagreed with Davie’s decision to go. He said: ‘I do not think the director-general should have resigned.
‘I think that the act by the director of news was an honourable and proper act. I think she took responsibility. I do not think that that meant that the director-general had also to resign.’
