Those within the BBC might be afraid to say so, but an ex-producer like me has no such qualms: Tim Davie, the BBC’s Director-General, isn’t cut out for the job. For the good of the BBC, Davie must go.

The last few weeks have been painfully bad for Davie. The Masterchef saga, which led to the departure of not one, but both main presenters, is the final nail in the coffin, after blunders over Glastonbury and Gaza.

Never has the BBC needed to have a visionary in post more to survive. Never has it had someone so clearly inadequate for the job

A review of the BBC’s February documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, which was released last week, found the programme had breached editorial guidelines for accuracy, having failed to disclose that its child narrator was the son of a Hamas agricultural official.

The review didn’t, however, find any breaches of impartiality. The BBC exonerated, then. Except Davie himself wasn’t. Because instead of having backed the filmmakers over the row, he and the BBC Chair, Samir Shah, ran for cover as hard as possible and let them take all the incoming flak.

The feeling within the BBC is that both Davie and Shah have been hopeless and craven in their response to this saga. The programme was not ‘a dagger to the heart’ of the BBC’s claim to impartiality, as Shah jumped the gun by saying in March. But don’t hold your breath for Shah to apologise for those comments, and to reassure filmmakers that, as their boss, he is protecting their backs. Or for Davie to do so.

BBC management’s main........

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