Former BBC presenter Huw Edwards should show “a shred of decency” and apologise to his “appalled” BBC colleagues, former reporter Michael Cole has claimed.
Huw Edwards, the disgraced news reporter, has reportedly been asked to return his £200,000 salary that he received since his arrest for child abuse images back in November.
Cole explained that he feels Edwards should return the salary and apologise to his colleagues that may have been blindsided by his actions.
He said: “If Huw Edwards has a single shred of decency left he will repay that money £200,000 with alacrity adding his apologies to his former colleagues at the BBC who have been appalled by the revelations.
Huw Edwards received £200,000 since his arrest
PA
“If we go back to November when he was arrested, the Director General and the Head of News knew that he’d been arrested, although the rest of the BBC did not.
“Under the terms of his freelance contract, there will have been a clause in which he undertook to never to bring the BBC into disrepute by anything he said or did.
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“The Director General and the Head of News would have been perfectly entitled to ask him, have you breached that clause? Have you brought the corporation into disrepute?
“Being a Chapel-going God-fearing man, as he has advertised himself over the years, he would have given them an honest answer.
“Then instead of allowing him to carry on working, or being paid working is far from the truth, they should have sacked him there and then.
“They would have been perfectly entitled to sack him for breach of contract.”
Micheal Cole said the newsreader should apologise to his appalled colleagues
GB News
He added: ““Instead they continued to pay him for another six months and at the end of it they allowed him to resign instead of sacking him.
“It has been abject the way the BBC’s handled this from the beginning to the end.
“The foot soldiers at the BBC, the people who don’t get paid these absurd inflated salaries which he doesn’t earn that in any way shape or form, they will have been appalled by this and they will have been ratified that the BBC at last has got their act together and asked for the money back.
“I would say when the money comes back give it straight to the NSPCC because they protect children against people like Huw Edwards.”
Lisa Nandy is the Culture Secretary
PA
Culture secretary Lisa Nandy is one of the politicians who said she feels that Edwards needs to return the money to the BBC.
She said in a statement to the outlet last week: “We had a very robust and frank discussion about the circumstances around the case, and some of the decisions that have been made during the case and since.
“Obviously I am particularly concerned to make sure people have confidence in the BBC.”
She added: “My concern is to make sure warning signs are caught, complaints are acted on, public money is used well and to make sure as far as humanly possible we don’t have a repeat of this situation in the future.”
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