BBC Director-General resigns over sex abuse row

Photo taken on October 23, 2012 shows BBC director general George Entwistle making a statement to the media after giving evidence to Commons Culture Committee on BBC response to Jimmy Savile affair in London . Entwistle resigned on November 10, 2012 after the broadcaster’s flagship news programme wrongly implicated a British politician in child sex abuse. AFP / ANDREW COWIE

LONDON—The BBC’s Director-General George Entwistle resigned late Saturday after the broadcaster’s flagship news programme wrongly implicated a British politician in child sex abuse.

“I have decided that the honourable thing to do is to step down,” Entwistle said in a televised statement outside the BBC’s London headquarters.

Entwistle, who only took over as director-general in September, said he decided to resign “in the light of the fact that the director-general is also the editor-in-chief and ultimately responsible for all content”.

“The wholly exceptional events of the past few weeks have led me to conclude that the BBC should appoint a new leader,” he added.

“To have been the director-general of the BBC even for a short period, and in the most challenging of circumstances, has been a great honour.”

Tim Davie, who is currently the BBC’s director of audio and music, will take over as acting director general.

Earlier Saturday, Entwistle had said it was “fundamentally wrong” of the current affairs programme Newsnight to air an interview with a man claiming he was repeatedly abused by a senior Conservative politician at a children’s home in the 1970s.

The programme did not identify the politician in last week’s report, but he was widely named on the Internet as former Tory party treasurer Alistair McAlpine.

McAlpine went public on Friday to strongly deny the allegations, and hours later his accuser Steve Messham retracted his claims, saying he had only just seen a picture of McAlpine and he was not the man who abused him.

Entwistle’s resignation comes just weeks after a storm of allegations that the late BBC presenter Jimmy Savile, one of the corporation’s biggest names, sexually abused hundreds of children over four decades.

Both Newsnight and the director-general were already under scrutiny after the show dropped an investigation into the Savile abuse claims last year.

Entwistle — who edited Newsnight himself a decade ago — had admitted before his resignation that the corporation faced a “crisis of trust” over the Newsnight broadcast and the Savile scandal.

Chris Patten, the chairman of the BBC’s governing body, the BBC Trust, said it was “one of the saddest evenings of my public life”.

Standing alongside Entwistle as he made his resignation statement, the former Hong Kong governor said: “At the heart of the BBC is its role as a trusted global news organisation.

“As the editor in chief of that news organisation George has very honourably offered us his resignation because of the unacceptable mistakes — the unacceptable shoddy journalism — which has caused us so much controversy.

“He has behaved as editor with huge honour and courage and would that the rest of the world always behaved the same.”

Lawyers for McAlpine meanwhile have said they would be pursuing legal action against “all media who have defamed Lord McAlpine’s reputation and published defamatory statements”.

The politician, who blasted the claims as “wholly false and seriously defamatory”, said he was forced to publicly deny them after he was named directly on the Internet and “by innuendo” in the print and broadcast media.

He said he had never been to any children’s home, let alone the Bryn Estyn facility in Wrexham, north Wales, where Messham lived as a teenager.