The ‘rich list’ of BBC journalists and presenters has been released and it makes for grim reading: eyewatering sums extracted under threat of criminal sanction from the nation’s TV viewers and handed over to the corporation’s overrated ‘stars’. The Press Gazette has more.
Forty-six BBC journalists earned above £178,000 last year from their work for the corporation, according to the BBC’s annual report for 2023/24 – three more than the year before.
BBC News at Six and Ten presenter Huw Edwards remains at the top of the ranking despite being off-air from July 2023 and for most of the financial year covered by the report.
In total some 54 BBC news staff are paid more than £178,000 (which is the cut-off for the BBC on disclosing top earners). By comparison, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is paid just over £167,000 a year.
Edwards’s salary was somewhere between £475,000 to £479,999 for the year to March 31st 2024. That was a 6% rise from £435,000 to £439,999 in 2022/23.
Edwards left screens after the Sun reported a BBC presenter was alleged to have paid a young person for explicit images. He was identified by his wife Vicky Flint who said he had been hospitalised due to a serious mental health episode.
Edwards formally resigned in April this year on medical advice. He did not receive a payoff but did receive full pay while he was off-air, which the BBC said was “normal policy” for staff while suspended.
Asked during a press briefing about the annual report on Tuesday how the salary paid to Edwards even though he was only on air for three months of the financial year was good value to licence fee payers, BBC Director General Tim Davie said: “We’re always trying to be very judicious with the spending of public money and no one wants to waste a pound but what you’re trying to do, and from the onset of that affair, was trying to act proportionately, fairly and navigate this appropriately. I think that’s what we did.”
Other than Edwards, two presenters earned more than £400,000: Question Time presenter Fiona Bruce and BBC Radio Ulster and BBC One (NI) presenter Stephen Nolan both took home between £405,000 and £409,999.
Worth reading in full.
The Telegraph‘s list (and the Mail’s) includes presenters such as Gary Lineker (£1.35m) and Zoe Ball (£0.95m) paid even more eyewatering sums for their service – despite, in Zoe’s case, seeing audiences fall by over half a million.
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Suggest you read Isobel Hardman”s “Why Do We Get the Wrong Politicians”
After Brexit and a landslide victory the Conservatives had a huge mandate. They then squandered it by doing the total opposite of that which they claimed they would do. It was a massive betrayal and political suicide. Hence, the Conservatives are now in the political wilderness.
With the advent of Reform I believe they are now irrelevant. Never forgive, never forget.
Reform are only 2 inches to the right of Labour these days. Sir Ego Nigel isn’t going to do much of the things that people really want, and would vote for. Labour will win again in 2029 because there is no serious alternative to centre left Marxism. And the centre now originates in the far leftisphere. So being to the right of that paradigm is still socialism.
I’ve read that there has been a change of emphasis from Farage and maybe some specific differences with Lowe regarding deportation of illegals and their families, but I was not aware Reform had officially changed any of their policies as stated in their manifesto. That said, can any of them be trusted to stick by those policies?
Farage appears to have softened his views on immigration.
I think there is only a discussion to be had on legal migration, and seasonal visa’s.
Why is there even a discussion on illegal immigration, criminal or otherwise, the big clue is in the first word!
If so-called Asylum Seekers are entering UK from France, why is not France processing their Asylum application? This is a rhetorical question obviously!
What specifically did he say?
My starting point for legal migration would be to stop it now, completely. I am open to arguments but there has been so much those arguments would need to be compelling for me to change my mind.
The situation with Rupert Lowe is not a good look, it has the air of a fit up!
Time will tell, and maybe he is all they claim he is, but the timing seems a little suspect, and the whole thing could be deeply damaging for the parties prospects, especially if its all just baseless accusations.
If Lowe and Habib form another right of centre party, then that could split the “right” vote further and damage Reforms chances.
I agree
I actually think a party that campaigned on honesty, integrity, truth, transparency and accountability would have zero chance of getting elected.
People can’t handle the truth, or not enough to be meaningful.
We don’t actually want politicians that tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, warts and all, we (the electorate – not we here) want people who will soothe us with pleasant sounding platitudes and give us free stuff.
Who wants to see children drown in overcrowded dinghies in the Channel, who wants to harm the planet, or see entire species go extinct, or thousands of seabirds dying horribly in an oil slick? Optics matter.
I am sure there is an element of truth in what you say. Despite that, Trump won, and so did Milei. So it’s not impossible for someone proposing real change to get elected. Harder in Europe though, with the party systems we have.
I have high hopes for Trump and the whole MAGA movement.
So far, so good on most topics – he’s still not great on vaccines and Operation Warp Speed.
However:
I know its early days, and activist judges are doing all they can to delay, proper prosecutions take time, but many people are already getting restless and doubt is setting in!
He has been better than version 1.0.
Of course he has limited scope because of the structure of the government at both federal and state level.
Agreed, they will fight him all the way, with everything they have, for some it is very much existential.
Because most people in the Conservative party are actually socialists. They believe in big government, regulation, a centrally planned economy.
They didn’t even believe in Brexit really. They called a referendum not to win an exit but to cement staying in the EU. And campaigned for staying.
As the author says, “let’s park ourselves an inch to the right of Labor and move ever further left with them as they head towards the Greens”
Except I challenge anyone to describe to me what that inch of a difference is.
Spot on. I presume the six million who voted for them at the last election, despite all the betrayal, are either also basically socialists (though they would deny that) or they are utterly and astonishingly deluded.
And it would be measured in centimetres. (Even millimetres would be more acceptable.)
We had no Brexit, we had Brexit In Name Only – BINO.
Because we had BINO, what we did do was done badly and the Left and Remainers can point and say look how wrong we were the Leave, best we get back in ASAP, and that argument is gaining momentum. This was hardly by chance!
Bravo!
It seems that every western society, except the US at the moment, is being dragged leftward despite there being some conservatives in power or about to gain power.
I expect this is because of their permanent government (civil services) being infested with playtime Marxists and Islamists. See the UK Home Office where there are 800 Muhammadans working against our people’s interests and for the Ummah.
The Islamo-communist bloc is our problem. And note that you cannot write Islamo-left or Islamo anything in the Daily Telegraph comments. I’ve tried and it blocks your post. We already have speech control by a so called right wing paper.
Remigration! Now.
The reason right wing prime ministers do nothing is because they receive their instructions from the Deep State just as left wing prime ministers do. It’s very simple.
I submit that one reason why Britain we didn’t like the Starmer government’s first few months was because it was the first time we’ve had a government policy of any kind for decades. We don’t like the policies, they are failing and being rowed back on, but at least they believed in something, unlike any government since Thatcher. Blair’s only policy was to reinforce leftism everywhere. As for the sad collection of Eton/Oxford schmoozers we’ve had since then – policy free, directionless, debt-obsessed, spineless, and ultimately useless, all of them – and they were around before the globalists?
Firstly, democracy needs to be improved to the extent that politicians are held accountable to their pre-election pledges. Look at Germany’s next Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, for example: pre-election he promises not to touch Germany’s constitutional limit on government spending; post-election he squirms and swivels and uses every trick in the book to plunge the country into massive debt.
If a politician reneges on his pre-election promises he should be removed from office, it is that simple.
Secondly, it can be no coincidence that all Western politicians, with the exception of Trump (who is not a career politician), execute essentially the same programmes: net zero, immigration, war, pandemics, and so on. There are obviously very, very ‘big’ personalities dictating programmes in the background. As Andrew Bridgen reported (https://expose-news.com/2025/01/20/andrew-bridgen-crimes-against-humanity/):
Bridgen initially felt that it seemed unlikely that the government was involved in a conspiracy due to the perceived incompetence of leaders like David Cameron, George Osborne, Theresa May and Boris Johnson. However, Bridgen said, it has become apparent that these leaders are likely puppets in a larger conspiracy.
He mentioned the video that is going viral of Dominic Cummings exposing the fact that all Cabinet meetings are scripted. The people responsible for creating these scripts and their agendas are unknown.
What Cummins said regarding scripted meetings is “absolutely true” Bridgen said. He often met immense resistance and pushback when trying to discuss certain topics with ministers that they didn’t want to talk about, such as HS2 or that Gulf War syndrome was caused by vaccines.
Who are these people dictating their policies to our politicians?
Those on the Right need to understand that Blair broke the ‘Crown In Parliament’, by outsourcing decision making to QUANGOs, allowing the government to plead plausible deniability: we can’t start fraccing, because the Climate Change Committee won’t allow it, as well as Carney’s Bank of England. And so we drift, directionless. David Starkey, Matthew Goodwin, and many others can see that, without fundamental change, to return to pre-Blair, everything will remain the same.
Unless a party has a detailed manifesto, including these changes, winning a General Election will be pointless, as the House of Lords will veto EVERYTHING, and I mean EVERYTHING.
And Farage is stopping this manifesto from ever being assembled. It needs many people, with a variety of specializations, from STEM, Medicine, Business, (even Football Clubs), Supply Chain Management, Finance, Manufacturing, Mining, and a will to enforce our laws, not foreign laws. Without that the political effort will be wasted, as well as another five years.
And Nigel has let the cat out of the bag, in the first two minutes:
https://youtu.be/HnZ7jsuK7ws