BORIS JOHNSON: Until BBC boss Tim Davie either comes clean on how Panorama doctored Trump’s speech – or resigns – I won’t be paying my licence fee

So where is Tim Davie? What has happened to the Director-General of the BBC? It rather looks as though he has decided to go to ground.

It is now four days since we learned of a jaw-dropping report into the Corporation’s Left-wing bias, and yet no one has come forward to explain. No one has apologised.

No one has even come close to resigning. It won’t do. On behalf of millions of loyal BBC licence payers (£174.50 per year, just for the right to own a TV), my message to Mr Davie is: Come on, Buster; We pay your wages.

Come out from your bunker in Portland Square. Come out from your tint-windowed limo. This thing is an absolute scandal, and it is not going away.

In case you missed the story, which has of course been studiously ignored by the national broadcaster, Mr Davie has long been in possession of a report by one of the BBC’s own former independent advisers on editorial standards, called Michael Prescott. I remember Mr Prescott from his days as a reporter on The Sunday Times. He always seemed to be a straight shooter, and in any case the facts of his report speak for themselves.

Among his more eye-popping discoveries was a Panorama programme broadcast in the run-up to the US election last year, in which the BBC flagrantly doctored a speech by the then Republican candidate, Donald Trump. The BBC was so desperate to make it look as though Trump incited a riot, that they electronically fabricated the evidence.

If you watched the programme last year, you would have seen a clip of Trump addressing the crowd on January 6, 2021, and apparently winding them up in the most inflammatory terms: ‘We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and I am going to be with you, and we fight, we fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you are not going to have a country any more.’

If you were watching, you would have assumed – since this was the BBC’s flagship news programme – you were getting the ipsissima verba of the President, with nothing added or taken away.

Michael Prescott’s report found systematic Left-wing bias existed within the BBC

I expect a lot of people did watch it and were confirmed in their view of those infamous events, namely that Trump did try to stage a sort of coup.

A reasonable person watching that Panorama would have been given pretty good evidence that Trump genuinely did set out to provoke those QAnon loonies with buffalo horns to storm the Capitol building. Panorama showed the President of the US urging his followers to march on Congress and ‘fight like hell’, and you would have assumed that he was indeed directly responsible for the violence in which several people died.

This matters because the BBC broadcast the programme just as that closely fought election of 2024 was coming to its climax and when lefties around the world still hoped and believed that Kamala Harris was going to win.

It matters because that doctored clip was – one assumes – widely shared and was perhaps influential with at least some voters in the US.

It matters above all because back in 2021, Donald Trump had said no such thing. What he actually said was: ‘We are going to walk down to the Capitol, and I’ll be with you. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.’

That was what he really said, but of course the Panorama team didn’t like it at all – particularly not the bit about ‘peacefully and patriotically’ – because it did not fit their narrative about Trump.

So, they scratched their heads, and watched the speech again and again, and finally they decided to go to the very end – 54 minutes later – and they took the stuff about fighting the outcome of the election, and they spliced it together with the stuff about marching to the Capitol, so as to create the impression they wanted.

What Panorama viewers saw was not what Trump said, but a Frankenquote, a fiction, entirely invented by the BBC to suit their political agenda. They had to make it up because the truth is that Trump did contest the result of the election – wrongly, in my view – but he did not actually incite the riots.

The proof is that the Democrats brought dozens of mainly spurious lawfare cases against Trump, after he left office, in the hope of preventing him from standing again. But he was never charged with incitement. The evidence just wasn’t there.

So the BBC made it up, shamelessly putting words of a highly damaging kind into the mouth of a man who is once again this country’s most important ally.

Tim Davie needs to explain that whole Panorama programme – why they chose to run a hatchet job on Trump, on the eve of the election, with ten interviewees attacking him and only one defending him, when Kamala Harris got the kid-glove treatment.

While he is at it, he needs to address all the findings in Michael Prescott’s report.

Why is there systemic bias in the BBC’s coverage of Israel and Gaza, with the BBC Arabic service seeming to serve as a sort of mouthpiece for Hamas?

Why does the BBC routinely suppress proper discussion of the trans debate?

Prescott cites the po-faced and sometimes hilarious acceptance of trans ideology, like the heart-warming all-outlets news story of a wrestler whose morale was boosted mid-career by sudden and dramatic success in the ring – without pointing out, of course, that the wrestler in question was born a chap but was now wrestling against women!

Don’t the public need to know that essential fact, in a Reithian kind of way?

Instead, the Beeb is guilty of suppressing the truth, and fabricating falsehoods, and the Prescott report proves it.

No one has been held to account for Panorama’s lies. All enquiries are treated with a bored contempt – as if it were somehow impertinent to ask. The organisation has clearly broken trust with the public, on key issues of public concern, and no one at the BBC has suffered so much as the tiniest reproach.

Contrast the ridiculous punishment of the newsreader Martine Croxall, who has been officially rebuked – because when her autocue asked her to use the ridiculous phrase ‘pregnant people’ she rolled her eyes and corrected it to ‘women’.

The BBC has chastised Ms Croxall for telling the plain unvarnished truth about human biology, while Panorama is currently getting away with ludicrous Left-wing falsehoods.

It is time for reporters to stand outside Davie’s house, in the time-honoured way, and shout at him: What is your response to the Prescott report?

When did you first know that Panorama lied? Why did you do nothing about it?

A few days of that and Davie should eventually emerge from his foxhole, and when he does, he should either give a convincing explanation for the Left-wing bias at the BBC, or else resign in favour of someone who will stop the rot.

Unless he does so I am simply going to stop paying my licence fee and suggest you do the same.