Maitlis to quit BBC for rival LBC after series of impartiality rows

EMILY MAITLIS has quit the BBC for commercial radio and a new political podcast, after repeatedly falling foul of the corporation’s impartiality rules.

Maitlis will be joined by Jon Sopel as the pair co-host a show on LBC and present the podcast together for the station’s parent company, Global.

The news took many at the BBC by surprise. Neither presenter will appear on the BBC again before their departure, sources said.

The deal is understood to be worth more than the pair’s current salaries of £325,000 to £329,999 for Maitlis and £230,000 to £234,999 for Sopel.

They are the latest BBC stars to be poached by Global. Andrew Marr joins LBC and Classic FM this year.

The move will allow Maitlis to speak her mind, free from the constraints of BBC guidelines.

She has been the subject of several impartiality rows, most notably in 2020 when she delivered a Newsnight monologue about Dominic Cummings’s Barnard Castle trip in which she stated: “Dominic Cummings broke the rules. The country can see that and it’s shocked the Government cannot.”

The facts were disputed at the time, and the BBC said the programme had fallen short of required standards. Maitlis later earned another rebuke when she told Press Gazette that the BBC had caved in to pressure from No 10.

“It’s funny to see something like [the apology over Cummings] happen so quickly when the corporation can take up to three decades to investigate serious journalistic malfeasance and critical management failings in the [Martin] Bashir investigation,” she said. “So I think it’s all a question of priority, really, isn’t it?”

She was reprimanded again for sharing a tweet by Piers Morgan, which criticised the Government’s handling of Covid. She was also found to have breached the BBC’S impartiality rules by retweeting criticism of Nadine Dorries, the Culture Secretary. Maitlis issued an apology, and BBC sources confirmed she had been “spoken to”.

The 51-year-old has been absent from Newsnight for several weeks as she was working on a Radio 4 series.

Maitlis tweeted: “We are so thrilled Global is giving us this opportunity to be big and ambitious with this project. Nevertheless, it will be a wrench to leave the BBC after 20 phenomenal years.”