Speaking on Times Radio on Tuesday, shadow culture secretary Nigel Huddleston said the BBC must pull out all the stops to avoid leaving licence fee payers facing a huge legal bill.
Senior Tories have been criticised for saying that the BBC should apologise to President Trump after he threatened to sue the corporation after it edited one of his speeches.
The Republican has threatened to sue the BBC for $1 billion, following claims Panorama “doctored” footage of a speech he made to his supporters before the Capitol riots on January 6, 2020.
The BBC has apologies with two of its top figures, including the director-general, resigning amid concerns about impartiality – notably the editing of a Panorama documentary from October 2024.
The corporation has until Friday at 10pm to respond to the president’s legal threat, however given that the documentary was not aired in America, legal experts believe Trump’s chances of success are limited. However, that hasn’t stopped senior Tories from demanding the BBC grovel and apologise to Trump.
Speaking on Times Radio on Tuesday, shadow culture secretary Nigel Huddleston said the BBC must pull out all the stops to avoid leaving licence fee payers facing a huge legal bill.
He said: “If you look at the complaint he’s got, the TV programme, the Panorama programme, he probably has legitimate claims to say, look, this was wrong and definitely requires and demands an apology. So I would advise the BBC to grovel here.
“They need to make sure that they communicate very clearly that they got this wrong and that they apologise. And then I think probably we need to all appeal to Donald Trump to make it clear that it’s licence payers, it’s taxpayers, that would suffer then because of the bad and poor decisions made by a bunch of left-wing journalists and anti-Trump journalists and make it clear that they should be the ones held to account.”
Asked later how the BBC should respond, Nigel Huddleston told GB News: “Well, with a big apology and grovel because they were wrong, and Donald Trump has a perfectly legitimate concern here. It wasn’t could be perceived to be misleading, it transparently was.”
Social media users were quick to criticise Huddleston’s comments, with one user writing: “Just watched this pathetic specimen on Sky News. If the likes of Nigel Huddleston was in office, Trump may as well be installed as UK President. What a grovelling little shit.”
Another added: “Thank God this moron is only the Shadow culture secretary otherwise his actions would humiliate us on the world stage. Do not give an inch to the corrupt, lying scumbag Trump – the BBC should apologise for the edit but that’s it, there is no case to answer beyond that.”
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward
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