or many years, as head of news and current affairs at Channel 4, the first thing I did every morning was read the Daily Mail or, on my day of rest, its sister paper, the Mail on Sunday. I’m guessing from the revelations this week that that isn’t something top BBC News executives do. I read the Mail because it carries a lot of great stories, many of them actually true. Also, what the Mail says today, a Conservative politician is likely to say tomorrow and I like to hear news first from its true source. In contrast, it seems some BBC News supremos know nothing at all about some major stories, even when those stories are about their own institution, if they have not been broadcast on the BBC. This week the BBC published a hilarious report into how on earth, or indeed in heaven, they managed to appoint as their religious affairs correspondent one of the most notorious television journalists of our time, Martin Bashir, and then promote him to editor, religion – which in British establishment terms is just one step down from the Archbishop of Canterbury. Some have asked if it was part of an evil BBC cover-up, but even Satan himself would draw the line at something this ridiculous. More than 25 years ago, the BBC’s Panorama programme gained its greatest ever scoop. It wasn’t, I regret to say, the exposure of the thalidomide scandal or terrible political corruption involving arms dealers, but an interview with a desperate young woman called Princess Diana. Boy, was the BBC proud of this – and they were, as far as I can make out, all boys. Hey, all those blokes got that vulnerable young woman to reveal her pain. Well done, chaps. Have a drink on me. And other boys in TV gave them every award you can imagine. Prince William has said that the content of that interview was driven by the poison Martin Bashir allegedly poured into his mother’s ear. We will never know by how much, but a scoop attained by deception and lies is tainted. Some say that supporters of public service broadcasting shouldn’t attack the BBC over the interview, because the scandal is being used by the right to undermine the institution. I, as someone who believes massively in the importance of the BBC, and led news and current affairs on the publicly owned Channel 4 for nearly 20 years, think the opposite. If we who support our system of public service broadcasting don’t call this out, we lose all credibility. What Bashir did was appalling, as was the BBC’s cover-up at the time, and we must say so. Very soon after that ghastly glorious success, people started asking questions, and the Mail on Sunday published an excellent piece of journalism exposing the way the interview had been obtained. It revealed that Bashir, in order to gain trust, had shown Princess Diana’s brother faked bank statements indicating one of his own key employees was in the pay of the News of the World. This was a story of huge significance that shocked British journalists. But the BBC’s report this week, written by a former BBC executive, finds that neither the head of news in 2016, James Harding, nor the head of current affairs, Joanna Carr, had ever read or heard of this exposé. With that level of ignorance about the biggest TV interview of our time, neither would ever have obtained a job at Channel 4. A third executive on the interview panel did know something about it, but his investigation of the matter took the form of asking the bloke in charge of Panorama at the time of the interview for reassurance. Guess what! He got it. But hey, they didn’t have to just read the papers. That information appeared in a book too. Here is another potential source of information that was available to them when Bashir applied for that religious affairs role: the former director general of the BBC, Tony Hall, knew Bashir had faked those bank statements because he had been involved in the initial investigations. Hall would certainly have been informed of the plan to appoint Bashir. He had himself been head of news when questions were raised about how the interview was obtained. The investigation then had found that Bashir was a good bloke but the poor freelance graphic designer tasked with creating the fake documents was a bad ‘un. What Bashir had done was known throughout the TV industry and regarded as a major scandal. And that information was known at the BBC in 2016, when Bashir was given the job. One person who was senior in the BBC news and current affairs department when the appointment was made told me: “There were gasps of disbelief. Jaws dropped. Some of us were speechless.” Another described Harding, who’d previously edited the Times, as an “idiot abroad” who knew nothing about TV journalism’s history. At Channel 4 we greeted the news with appalled mirth. And that was not just because of the Princess Diana interview. In the world of TV current affairs, there were repeated questions about how Bashir gained his scoops. The mother of one of the little girls killed by Russell Bishop – the so-called “babes in the wood” killer – said Bashir, while making a film for the BBC, had lost her dead child’s bloodstained clothing. Bashir denied this. I believe the BBC needs to investigate these allegations. Bashir went to work for ITV some time after the Diana interview. There, there were more questions, including highly publicised complaints about his Michael Jackson interview. Ironically, he was the subject of a letter of complaint sent by the BBC to ITV. BBC executives said Bashir had invented two false stories about them. He had allegedly told the Metropolitan police that the BBC was withholding important evidence about the 1999 Soho pub bomber, which was entirely untrue. The BBC also complained that Bashir had told the children of victims of the mass murderer Harold Shipman that Panorama was proposing to broadcast its film on the case before the trial, which could potentially have resulted in him getting off: a terrible lie. A spokesperson for Bashir said: “Both of these claims are untrue and categorically denied. Mr Bashir did not have any such conversation with the Metropolitan police. Mr Bashir conducted only part of the work on this investigation, the majority was completed by a colleague. Regarding the second claim (concerning reporting on the Dr Harold Shipman case), Mr Bashir only had dealings with one family and all of those meetings were conducted with a senior producer colleague.” The BBC’s report this week does not reference that letter at all. But there was yet more damaging evidence about Bashir. After working at ITV, Bashir went to the US. There he was suspended by ABC for making crude and sexist comments at an awards ceremony, and then resigned from MSNBC after making derogatory comments about the US politician Sarah Palin. One of the BBC’s interview panel looked into this and it was decided that making vile, sexist remarks in public didn’t make you ineligible to opine on religion and morality. This week’s report does question that view, but it does not condemn the BBC for appointing Bashir. Apparently, he was the best man for the job at the time and had “a deep grasp of theology”. He also had, as was widely known within and without the BBC at the time he was appointed, a questionable grasp of ethics. His appointment was scandalous, and all true supporters of the BBC should say so.