The resignations of BBC Director General Tim Davie and Director of News Deborah Turness over a Panorama edit of a 2021 speech by United States President Donald Trump have plunged the United Kingdom’s national broadcaster into one of the deepest crises in its history.

But the scandal did not begin with a single programme or a single misjudgement. Close to the centre of this crisis is Robbie Gibb, a man who has spent more than a decade shaping the BBC’s political coverage, zig-zagging between the BBC and the Conservative government while advancing his own partisan project that has distorted the corporation’s journalism on Brexit, Trump and, eventually, Gaza.

I saw the effects of that influence myself when the BBC delayed and then dropped our film on Gaza’s doctors. What is unfolding today is simply the moment when a long-running pattern of interference has burst into full public view.

Gibb has been such a huge figure in the wings of public life in the UK for so long that it is a relief he is now being publicly named and discussed. Until the Panorama scandal and the resignations it triggered, he was rarely scrutinised outside political and media circles. Now he is suddenly in headlines and the subject of fierce debate across social media, as people try to understand how one unelected figure came to wield such influence.

It is hard to think of anyone who has had a more pervasive influence on British public life without any accountability, from within both No 10 and the BBC. Gibb has been arguably the most influential yet hidden helping hand to Brexit politics, the Conservative Party and Israel, while bestriding two of the nation’s most important institutions as, variously, the head of the BBC’s Westminster team, the head of press at No 10, and then a pivotal BBC board member influencing BBC News. There has been little change in his guiding motivations or modus operandi between these roles, just a strong belief that only he could hold the line against an overwhelmingly liberal and left-leaning BBC “wokerati” and ensure impartiality. But in so doing, he has destroyed any notion of it, leading to the present crisis in the BBC, a $1bn battle with Trump and a collapse in the credibility of its coverage of Gaza.

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As the editor of Channel 4 News from 2012 to 2022, I had experience of Gibb from the moment he was appointed press secretary at No 10 in 2017. His instinct to manage political reporting in ways that advanced his own political project was evident from the start. From the outset, he severely restricted Channel 4 News’s access to government ministers, access that remained freely available to the BBC and reflected the close relationships he had built during his years overseeing parts of its political output. Gibb was well known inside the BBC for his longstanding support for Brexit, a cause he had championed since working for the Conservative Party from 1997 to 2002. His conduct at No 10 with the BBC seemed little different from his BBC years; his direct control of the output was swapped for bargaining over access, helping him to continue to shape British politics. And he had all the BBC’s political staff on speed dial.

Relations worsened in 2018 when Channel 4 News became the first broadcaster to cover the Windrush scandal. It had emerged that hundreds of Black British citizens, most of whom had arrived from the Caribbean more than 50 years earlier, had been wrongly detained, deported and denied legal rights. The scandal resulted from policies implemented by Theresa May in her previous role as home secretary. As we continued to report on the growing number of older victims, Gibb reacted furiously. He barred Channel 4 News from interviews with the prime minister and other ministers, reportedly telling aides we were “banging on and on about something no one else cares about”.

He then extended that ban to the Conservative Party conference, excluding us from the traditional round of prime ministerial interviews that had been granted for decades. Every other broadcaster, including the BBC, signed a letter warning that the ban set a dangerous precedent. A former BBC colleague of Gibb later approached me at the conference to say he was “hopping mad, he’s absolutely livid”.

Multiple BBC journalists told me at the time that Gibb was still effectively directing parts of the BBC’s political coverage from No 10, using his influence and longstanding relationships to shape what was reported and who gained access. Many said they struggled to distinguish between Gibb at the BBC and Gibb at No 10 because he continued to exert influence over key decisions. One of the major advantages for No 10 was Gibb’s sway over the BBC’s post-Brexit coverage. The BBC chose not to look back and investigate what had happened during the referendum, unlike Channel 4 News, which pursued the Vote Leave and Cambridge Analytica investigations. Several BBC colleagues later told me this reluctance to scrutinise the referendum was not new but reflected how Gibb had operated in real time when he oversaw BBC political output during the campaign itself.

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In 2019, we obtained emails between Arron Banks, the major Brexit donor, and Gibb sent in the run-up to the referendum. The emails showed that Banks complained to Gibb about a BBC inquiry into Leave. The European Union’s attempts to build support within far-right online communities and asked Gibb to intervene. After Banks raised his concerns with Gibb, the investigation was dropped. The BBC said the story did not meet editorial standards, but weeks later, the same investigation was published by The Sunday Times. Banks also told Gibb that Nigel Farage did not appear often enough on the BBC. In the months leading up to the referendum, Farage then appeared repeatedly across the broadcaster’s output.

In 2019, after Gibb left No 10 with Theresa May, Boris Johnson appointed him to the BBC board, an influential position from which he was not meant to interfere in day-to-day editorial decisions. Despite this, multiple allegations emerged that he continued to do so, including attempts to block appointments, visits to newsrooms and repeated involvement in editorial matters. In 2020, he took a controlling interest in the Jewish Chronicle – the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper, a paper long regarded as the voice of Britain’s Jewish community – on behalf of undisclosed backers, and the paper then shifted sharply to the right. Several of its most respected journalists resigned amid allegations that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was influencing its coverage. All of this occurred while Gibb, as the most experienced editorial voice on the BBC board, was allegedly exerting an increasingly dominant influence, despite the board’s rules prohibiting direct editorial involvement. In Gibb’s case, old habits clearly died hard.

After the horrific Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s unrelenting two-year assault on Gaza, which flattened much of the Palestinian enclave and killed more than 70,000 people, including 20,000 children, I was told by multiple sources that Gibb, as the strongest editorial voice on the BBC board, was placing BBC News under pressure over its Israel coverage from the very start. The pressure came to a head in February, when the BBC broadcast and then withdrew the film Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone.

The film had been produced externally and failed to disclose that its 13-year-old narrator’s father was a deputy agriculture minister in Gaza’s Hamas-run government. In the aftermath, the BBC delayed our investigation into Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system and the killing of more than 1,500 medics, offering a series of excuses until eventually admitting they would not run it while they examined the other film. It was an extraordinary and unprecedented decision that effectively silenced and blunted their coverage. Only after we went public was Gaza: Doctors Under Attack finally broadcast, not on the BBC but on Channel 4.

I was told that the board, under Gibb’s influence, effectively pushed Tim Davie and Deborah Turness to first obscure their position on our film, then ask us to make significant changes, before finally saying they would run only three one-minute clips from our 65-minute investigation on their news outlets. This was a film about hospitals being bombed and evacuated, about doctors and medics and their families being targeted and killed, and about hundreds of others detained and tortured. It had already been approved by the BBC and later ran on Channel 4 – and Mehdi Hasan’s new media platform, Zeteo – without any complaints. It has since been nominated for many awards and is now beginning to win them.

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In the end, it seems Davie and Turness did not fall because they stood up to Gibb, but because they reacted too slowly to the crisis his world helped create. After years of pressure over Gaza and mounting complaints about bias, the misleading Panorama edit of Trump’s speech and their hesitant response to his legal and political onslaught became the final straw. Only Gibb knows whether he intended to push the BBC into a position where it is now facing a potential billion-dollar lawsuit from a sitting US president, but his influence and alliances were central to the chain of decisions that led there. And now, hiding in plain sight, Gibb’s decades-long mission to reshape the national broadcaster around his own political agenda, dressed up as a defence of impartiality, can finally be seen for what it is: an absolute disaster for the BBC and for the public it is meant to serve.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.