Can the BBC survive this crisis?

·26 min·2 clips

Senior sources say the BBC report leak was politically orchestrated, with Boris Johnson calling for Tim Davey's resignation.

The BBC opens the show. Breaking news about resignations at the top of the corporation gives the episode its first jolt, while a senior BBC voice insists BBC News is not institutionally biased. The setting adds a strange little twist. Pippa Carrera and Kieran Stacey are out of the cramped parliamentary office and in The Guardian's King's Cross head office, so the crisis has a faintly surreal Monday-morning feel. Then the agenda widens. The conversation shifts from BBC fallout to the budget, where Labour's internal management looks almost as hard as the fiscal maths. MPs sound jumpy. The government has tried to bring them along through round tables with economists, Kitty Usher, and Treasury minister Torsten Bell. The numbers still do not seem to have landed. The hosts keep the fiscal case separate from the political risk, especially the danger of going into a budget while preparing to breach a major manifesto commitment. One image does the work. Starmer's campaign as a Ming vase across an ice rink becomes, in one minister's harsher version, wrestling a squirrel across a minefield. That is pretty much the mood. Kieran says Labour MPs remain shocked even after two weeks of groundwork about an income tax rise being in scope. A frontbencher still asks whether the government is really going to do it, which says plenty. The Resolution Foundation plan comes in as part of the likely path: 2p up on income tax, 2p off national insurance, and about six billion pounds raised while ministers argue employed people see no net effect. By the end, the three pressures are still there: the BBC, the budget, and leadership mutterings in Labour. Nothing sounds settled.

As heard by us

A BBC crisis story that becomes a sharper study of how Westminster manages pressure.

Politics Weekly UK opens on the BBC in crisis, with the chairman saying the Director General and the head of news are resigning after a report that has put editorial standards under heavy scrutiny.

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Why you'd press play

BBC resignations meet Labour budget nerves.

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