High-stakes fight with the right? The BBC has been here before

Christopher Silvester is a freelance journalist, author and consultant.

U.S. President Donald Trump intends to sue the BBC for defamation in Florida over a documentary broadcast during the 2024 presidential campaign. Aired as part of the broadcaster’s flagship current affairs program “Panorama,” questionably edited footage from the president’s speech on Jan. 6, 2021 gave the impression he had urged his supporters to storm the capitol in Washington, DC.

Trump only discovered this after the statute of limitations for libel action in the U.K. had passed, so he can’t sue there. Had he known in time, he may have received a settlement or award for damages worth tens of thousands of pounds — especially now the BBC has issued a public apology.

But suing in the U.S. is different. On the one hand, Trump could make a vast claim for damages — somewhere between $1 billion and $5 billion, he says. On the other, there’s no easy path for his lawyers to claim jurisdiction, as the offending documentary was never made available in the U.S. `They also face the substantial hurdle of proving his reputation has been materially damaged and that the program’s makers were guilty of express malice. The BBC, for its part, has made clear it will defend itself against any such claim.

We’ve been here before. Long before Trump became a politician, an earlier edition of “Panorama” similarly plunged the BBC into an existential crisis — and it offers some crucial lessons.

Back in the mid-1980s, when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, the show found itself in similar turmoil. The controversy was over a program that, among other errors, manipulated footage to make several tendentious claims that a handful of backbench Conservative MPs were “racialists” or quasi-fascists.

Entitled “Maggie’s Militant Tendency,” the program was a humdinger of a political knifing. The title alone was guaranteed to raise hackles on the right, as the Militant Tendency was a hard-left subsect that had used infiltrationist tactics to get a few of its followers elected as Labour MPs. Put plainly, “Panorama” was suggesting a similar sprinkling of right-wing extremists had been gaining ground in the Conservative Party.

Writing about the incident in 2002, former “Panorama” reporter Tom Bower called it “a woefully misconceived programme … To consider equating a handful of alleged Tory racists with the widespread Marxist infiltration of the Labour party was lunacy, especially in the aftermath of Thatcher’s virulent criticism of the BBC during the Falklands war.”

In the program, an interview with Conservative MP Harvey Proctor was “edited so crudely that it showed me in three different suits in what was presented as a single meeting,” Proctor recalled in a recent article. “John Selwyn Gummer, the Conservative Party Chairman, commented that he knew I was many things, but a quick-change artist I was not. It was not satire, it was broadcast reality.”

In another sequence, footage of a uniform-clad MP Gerald Howarth was shown with simultaneous commentary, claiming he had attended a fascist meeting in Italy, implying he was wearing a fascist uniform. In fact, he had been wearing a train driver’s uniform while attending a rally of steam railway enthusiasts.

It was certainly not investigative journalism’s finest hour.

After airing in January 1984, “Maggie’s Military Tendency” eventually led to defamation actions from five Conservative MPs. While some dropped their suits, the actions brought by Howarth and Neil Hamilton came to court a little over two years later. And the BBC, rather than apologize for some of its errors, sought to fight them tooth and nail.

I was a junior reporter at Private Eye magazine at the time, where I specialized in political gossip, and I had already met Hamilton and his wife Christine. After speaking to them at length, I had challenged the program’s thesis in print soon after it aired. To use an earthy phrase, it appeared Hamilton and Howarth had been stitched up like kippers.

Once the trial began, it lasted a mere four days — and those four days had a touch of the absurd about them.

One of the claims against Hamilton was that he’d done a Hitler impersonation after visiting the Reichstag in Berlin with a group of Conservative MPs. And in order to show that his impersonation had been satirical rather than a serious political commitment, he was asked to give a performance in the witness box not once but twice, as the judge had been taking notes the first time. “I would be staggered if anybody could possibly be upset by it,” Hamilton said.

Another claim was that in 1973, he’d attended a convention of the Italian fascist party, MSI, in the company of two fellow members of the Monday Club — a British right-wing pressure group. There, Hamilton had “thought it was jolly good fun if I did a speech in Italian because I could do a Charlie Chaplin Great Dictator speech which they would not recognize but would give us a lot of enjoyment.” Whether it had worked as comedy or satire, one probably needed to have been there, but as proof of a genuine fascist mentality, it fell short by a substantial measure.

Then, four days into proceedings, before the BBC defense could take the floor, the organization’s management, under pressure from its Board of Governors — which was, in turn, under pressure from Conservative ministers — made substantial settlements.

The BBC apologized for falsely claiming that Hamilton and Howarth were members of a “virulently racist and anti-Semitic” extreme right-wing group called Tory Action, for falsely claiming they had misled the Conservative Party chairman by denying links to Tory Action, and for falsely claiming they had made racist remarks or goose-stepped while on a visit to Bonn in 1983.

Hamilton and Howarth each received £20,000 — a fair whack back then, and libel damages were tax-free.

After the verdict, Hamilton reacted to their victory by channeling one of Winston Churchill’s wartime speeches: “This is a magnificent victory of David over Goliath, and represents, for us, the end of the beginning, but for some on the BBC probably the beginning of the end.” Later, Hamilton and Howarth sought a meeting with the new BBC Chairman Duke Hussey to ensure the organization’s “integrity can be restored, its political impartiality re-established, and its legitimate editorial independence protected.”

Then, as now, there was a crisis of governance at the BBC. Then, as now, there was a wider context of BBC travails. And then, as now, there was an impending political challenge for the BBC to obtain charter renewal and an extension of its jealously guarded license fee.

All media organizations fight to defend against defamation actions, and the BBC is no exception. But while the broadcaster may justifiably contend it has no case to argue against Trump, it would serve us well to remember that in the 1980’s, the BBC was excoriated for wasting license-payers’ money in defending indefensible claims for almost two years — and rightly so.