Asylum

When the BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, took over in 2020, he declared his founding principle to be “impartiality”. Three years later, a row over that principle and how it applies across the corporation has created a crisis that has quite clearly caught managers by surprise. Familiar, fixed points in the weekly TV schedule unexpectedly falling off air in quick succession is proof of a crisis that has become something much bigger than a row about some tweets. The Gary Lineker issue is more than an argument about the opinions of a highly paid sports presenter – it is a test…