The former BBC presenter Huw Edwards has been given a six-month suspended prison sentence, completing an extraordinary fall from grace, after admitting accessing indecent photographs of children as young as seven. Edwards, 63, who spent four decades at the BBC, looked pale and tired in the dock at Westminster magistrates court as the chief magistrate, Paul Goldspring, handed down the sentence. He was told that he had been “perhaps the most recognised newsreader/journalist in the UK” but that his “long-earned reputation is in tatters”. His six-month prison sentence will be suspended for two years and he will be obliged to attend a 40-day programme designed to stop him offending again. He pleaded guilty to three charges of making indecent images of children after he was sent 41 illegal images by Alex Williams, a convicted paedophile. Edwards’ avoidance of jail despite being convicted of viewing some of the worst categories of images was criticised by campaigners. Marilyn Hawes, the chief executive of Freedom From Abuse, said: “A sentence like this, which isn’t a sentence, what message is it giving to others who are out there doing exactly the same and worse?” As he handed down the sentence, the chief magistrate said he had accepted evidence that Edwards had no recollection of viewing the indecent images owing to his mental health issues at the time of the offences. The court heard from a forensic psychosexual therapist that there was a “tangible risk” of suicide as Edwards, who is currently an inpatient at the private Nightingale mental health hospital in London, “considers that his family situation may be improved if he was not alive”. The report went on to claim that social media had allowed Edwards, who had “managed” his sexual attraction to men since 1994, to “re-engage” with those desires and “boost his fragile self-esteem” but that his mental health issues led to a failure of judgment. The court heard from a consultant psychiatrist who said Edwards was a “complex” individual who had a “particularly challenging” relationship with his father. The court heard that a “restricted, puritanical but often hypocritical background of growing up in a particular cultural milieu of south Wales with a father who was highly regarded and lauded outside the family, but was perceived as behaving monstrously within the family, created both an enduring cognitive dissonance and low self-esteem”. This had been “compounded by a sense of being inferior by not getting into Oxford and going to Cardiff instead, and being therefore something of an outsider at the BBC”, it was said. Edwards took two months of sick leave in 2018 after an “anonymous denunciation”, the court was further told, and he “exhibited a mental impairment that had a significant (non-trivial) effect on his ability to carry out day-to-day activities” over the following six years. A BBC spokesperson said: “We are appalled by [Huw Edwards’s] crimes. He has betrayed not just the BBC but audiences who put their trust in him.” Speaking in Rome, the prime minister, Keir Starmer, said: “I’m really shocked in relation to the Huw Edwards case – really shocked and appalled, as I’m sure everybody who has read or looked at it is. As far as the sentence is concerned, that is for the court to decide, having looked at all the available evidence.” Edwards had been involved in an online chat with Williams, then 19, on WhatsApp between December 2020 and August 2021, during which he sent the younger man hundreds of pounds “apparently off the back of [him] sending pornographic images to Mr Edwards”. Edwards received 377 sexual images from Williams, including 41 indecent images of children, of which seven were category A (the worst), 12 were category B, and 22 were category C. In his opening statement at the hearing, the prosecutor Ian Hope said: “It is clear from the face of the WhatsApp chat recovered that a deal of the chat between Alex Williams and Mr Edwards was sexual in nature. “It is also clear that Mr Edwards was paying not insignificant sums of money – low hundreds of pounds on an occasional basis – to Alex Williams, which Mr Williams directly asked for on several occasions, as gifts or presents, apparently off the back of sending pornographic images to Mr Edwards, about which images they chatted. “Alex Williams has stated that the money was more generally to support him at university and amounted to around £1,000 to £1,500.” Hope said Edwards did not respond after Williams sent him a sexual video of children aged around seven to nine and 11 to 13 and that there was evidence that he had asked for illegal images not to be sent. The prosecutor said: “On 10 February 2021, a category A video was sent which is notable because the age of one of the children involved was significantly younger than in the rest of the images sent – it showed several acts of penetration between two children aged around seven to nine and 11 to 13 respectively. “There was no direct response from Mr Edwards to this video, beyond it being marked as ‘read’. A week later … a number of attachments were sent, which included two category B videos and four category C still images comprising indecent images of children. “On 19 February 2021, Alex Williams asked: ‘Is the stuff I’m sending too young for you?’ The next response from Mr Edwards is dated 22 February 2021 saying: ‘Don’t send underage.’” The court heard, however, that Edwards told Williams “go on” when asked if he wanted “naughty pics and vids” of somebody described as “yng [sic]”. He wrote “yes xxx” when he was asked by Williams if he wanted sexual images of a person whose “age could be discerned as being between 14 and 16”. Williams, who was charged in relation to his WhatsApp chat with Edwards and was convicted of seven offences after an investigation by South Wales police, received a 12-month suspended sentence on 15 March. The judge said the mitigation offered by Edwards’s defence had to be put in context. He said: “I accept you told the individual who sent the images not to send images of people who were underage, but only at a later stage. That is not from the beginning.” Edwards’s sentence means he will avoid jail unless he commits further offences or breaches the conditions set by the judge. The court heard that the phone used by Edwards to communicate with Williams had never been recovered but that the WhatsApp messages indicated that a number of social media platforms were used for the sharing of images. The two men met in person only once. Edwards, wearing a blue cardigan in the dock, suffered from depression and other mental health conditions, the court heard, and had been diagnosed with arteriosclerosis, a form of heart disease that affected his moods, in December 2023. The defence barrister, Philip Evans KC, said Edwards – who has separated from his wife, with whom he has five adult children – wished “to apologise to the court” and those he had hurt. Evans said: “He recognises the repugnant nature of such indecent images and the hurt that he has done those who appear in such images. For his part on that he apologises sincerely and he makes it clear he has the utmost regret. He recognises that he has betrayed the priceless trust of so many people. “He recognises he has hurt and damaged his family and his loved ones around him. For all those things he is truly sorry and he is truly sorry he has committed these offences.”