By Andrew Marr

So yet another tough guy, don’t-give-an-inch leader of the BBC is out.

Tim Davie was bad at politics, rubbing MPs up the wrong way, rarely apologising and assuming, too often, that all criticism was ideological and personally hostile.

The trouble was, as compared to predecessors such as John Birt, Greg Dyke, Tony Hall or Mark Thompson, he was never nearly interested enough in the fast-moving, high adrenaline and high risk business of news.

He joined as a marketing man, from Pepsi. A Tory, as it happens, he never seemed exactly fascinated by the granular struggles of news and current affairs journalism. He was above that. Experienced journalists left.

This need not have been too serious had the corporation tried to bring in the best outsiders. But some of the shrewdest hacks in the trade, hoping to join the BBC, weren’t even given the courtesy of an interview.

An American newspaper editor once drolly joked that his job was to separate the wheat from the chaff… and then print the chaff. Like many, I fear there has been too much chaff – virtue signalling non-stories, meaningless “vox pops” and the elevation of celebrity guff above the wheat of real, essential information – which requires open minded fascination about our changing world. The launch of “BBC Verify” led some to wonder what the rest of the huge BBC reporting operation was meant to be doing.

On Tim Davie’s watch, BBC News was run by........

© LBC