Sir Keir Starmer is expected to tell Donald Trump that the BBC must “get its house in order” after the US president vowed to forge ahead with a lawsuit of up to $5bn (£3.8bn) against the broadcaster.
The Prime Minister is set to use a call with Mr Trump this weekend to say he believes the BBC must uphold the highest possible standards, including correcting mistakes quickly.
On Friday night, Mr Trump said he was still planning to sue the corporation, despite the broadcaster apologising for doctoring one of his speeches.
Speaking on board Air Force One, the president told The Telegraph that he would formally seek damages of between “$1bn and $5bn” against the BBC as early as next week.
He claimed that Sir Keir was “very embarrassed” by the scandal and had already tried to “put a call in to me” about it.
Credit: White House pool
It is understood that Sir Keir will use the call to insist that the BBC is a strong British institution and has a crucial role to play in an age of disinformation.
The Telegraph understands that, from Mr Trump’s perspective, the call will be a sense check to see what the BBC is doing to reform its processes as his legal team plans its next step.
A senior White House official told The Telegraph that the phone call between the two world leaders would be amicable, saying: “It’s always going to be friendly. That’s just how the two of them are.”
The BBC was thrown into turmoil by The Telegraph’s revelation that it had doctored a speech delivered by Mr Trump to make it seem that he was inciting rioting at the Capitol on Jan 6 2021.
Tim Davie, the BBC’s director-general, and Deborah Turness, the chief executive of BBC News, resigned last week after a backlash against the corporation’s worst crisis since the Jimmy Savile scandal.
On Thursday, the corporation apologised to the US president but rejected his claim of defamation. Despite the apology, Mr Trump said he could still bring legal action.
He said: “I think I have to do it. They’ve even admitted that they cheated… They changed the words coming out of my mouth. The people of the UK are very angry about what happened, as you can imagine, because it shows the BBC is fake news.”
Praising The Telegraph’s reporting as a “great service … exposing fake news”, he said the broadcaster had acted “worse than what CBS did with Kamala”.
The president was referring to a broadcast of CBS’s 60 Minutes last year, shortly before the election, when an interview with his political opponent Kamala Harris was edited to make her answer sound more coherent.
On Saturday night, Rishi Sunak, the former prime minister, said the BBC had failed in representing the views of Britain as a whole, saying that “the corporation cannot be captured by any one part of the UK – it must belong to all of us”.
He wrote in The Sunday Times: “It is falling short in that task,” calling on the broadcaster to appoint an internal watchdog “responsible for spotting problems and addressing them before they have turned into a scandal”.
He added: “This is the BBC Verify that the corporation actually needs. It cannot continue to sit back and wait for others to highlight its mistakes, and then ponder whether to react before comforting itself that any criticism must be driven by base political motives.”
Downing Street sources said that Sir Keir’s position on the BBC has not changed since earlier this week when he was asked about it at Prime Minister’s Questions.
In a separate interview on GB News on Friday night, Mr Trump claimed he had an “obligation” to take on the BBC, which he labelled “corrupt” and “beyond fake”.
He said: “This was so egregious. If you don’t do it, you don’t stop it from happening again with other people. I think you probably have an obligation. I’d like to find out why they did it.”
Credit: Fox News
The president hit out at the BBC’s “stupid” claim that it had “unintentionally” misled viewers about the content of his speech on Jan 6 2021.
“They wrote me a nice letter saying [they] apologise. But when you say it’s unintentional, I guess if it’s unintentional, you don’t apologise,” he said. “But they took my words, you know, and I made a beautiful statement, and they made it into a not beautiful statement.”
Lord Hall of Birkenhead, a former BBC director-general, told the BBC not to pay Mr Trump a penny in an interview with Laura Kuenssberg, the broadcaster’s political editor, on Saturday afternoon.
But Sam Nunberg, a political adviser to Mr Trump’s 2016 campaign, said that the BBC “should be taking this extremely seriously”.
He told Radio 4’s Today programme: “Remember, while the president I’m sure has been advised that he cannot sue because of the statute of limitations in England here, in the United States, as a resident of the state of Florida, where I speak to you from, he could bring the case here.
“I suspect that a case for defamation for editing his speech on Jan 6 on the clips where it shows that he would be responsible for the violence that day, that case itself would survive the motion to dismiss.
“The BBC would not be able to get the case thrown out before it would get to a jury and at that point I think a jury here in the United States and particularly in the state of Florida of the president of the United States would be quite favourable.”
