Huw Edwards has been urged to hand back the hefty pay packet he received from the BBC in the time after he was arrested in November 2023.
Edwards pled guilty to three counts of making indecent images of children after he received 41 pictures from 25-year-old sex offender Alex Williams.
Two of the images found in a horrific WhatsApp exchange showed boys as young as seven years old and after pleading guilty at Westminster Magistrates’ Court, Edwards could face a jail term.
Edwards was suspended by the BBC in July last year after a report emerged in The Sun that he’d paid a teenager for explicit images.
Earlier this month, the BBC confirmed it had paid the broadcaster £475,000-£479,999 between April 2023 and April 2024 – £40,000 more than he was paid the year before.
With questions surrounding his vast salary, his former BBC colleagues Jeremy Vine and Jennie Bond – who worked with Edwards at BBC News before she departed in 2003 – debated whether or not some of those funds should return to the licence fee-backed Beeb.
Huw Edwards: Jennie Bond said Huw should return the money earned since his arrest
CHANNEL 5
“Obviously Huw Edwards has done disgusting things, and may go to jail… the BBC has washed its hands of him, but has some of this washed off on the BBC?” Vine asked on his Channel 5 show to a caller named Lynn.
The Glaswegian caller raged: “Yes, I absolutely think so. I pay my licence fee, I always have paid my licence fee and it makes me sick to my stomach that my money has gone into the pocket of a paedophile.
“What should’ve happened as far as I’m concerned is he should’ve been suspended with no pay and waited for the due course to take place.
“Why was he still paid? He should’ve been suspended with no pay because at the end of the day, it is British taxpayers’ money that’s gone into his pocket and I don’t want to be funding a paedophile!”
Huw Edwards pled guilty at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday
PA
Vine then chipped in to put Lynn’s point to Bond, saying: “It’s £200,000 since his arrest… Jennie, this is a kind of legal point I’m not expecting you to know, but we both know the BBC – could they try and recoup the money or could they cancel his pension?”
Bond weighed in with a suggestion for Edwards: “Frankly, if Huw has any dignity left then he would hand some of the money back, certainly the £200,000 he has made since his arrest.
“I think it would be gracious of him to do that. I don’t think there is any legal recourse for the BBC.
“I think we have to remember that the BBC as a whole is being tarnished and reputationally this is very damaging.
“But I think you and I both know Jeremy that the newsroom is – quite rightfully – separate from the corporation itself. I know it’s quite a hard division to make but we in the news without fear or favour question the bosses at the BBC and that’s entirely right.
“So in the newsroom itself they were kept in the dark right until this week which is extraordinary.”
“If Huw has any dignity left he’d hand that money back.”@jenniebond1 responds to caller Lynn who is sickened by the idea of her licence fee subsidising a massive salary for a paedophile.@theJeremyVine | #JeremyVine pic.twitter.com/MC9e9mdESm
— Jeremy Vine & Storm Huntley on 5 (@JeremyVineOn5) August 1, 2024
Meanwhile, another of Edwards’ former BBC colleagues pulled no punches with their verdict on the disgraced broadcaster’s plea.
Nicky Campbell took to X soon after Edward entered the plea and typed: “Let’s think about the children in these images. Callously exploited and psychologically destroyed.
“They are not images. They are humans who will live with this forever and all for the twisted pleasure of the disgusting men who trade and swap this misery. And don’t call it child ‘pornography’. journalists. It is ‘abusive images’.
“And if mental health was mitigation for every custodial crime the prisons wouldn’t be at bursting point. They’d be half full.”
