How long can the BBC dance around the double standards that have plagued the organisation? - David Behrens

For the BBC, the delay is an exercise in burying bad news. It would rather promote itself as an enlightened, equal opportunity employer. But Carol Vorderman can tell you a different story.

She has twice been booted out of the Beeb and at last weekend’s Edinburgh TV Festival she let fly “in anger and without apology” at its endless capacity to trample over everyone in pursuit of its own interests.

Ms Vorderman, the long-time former co-host of Countdown at Yorkshire TV, most recently fell foul of the corporation by expressing political views on social media while presenting a show on Radio Wales. They got rid of her with “no conversation to be had”, she said.

Yet at around the same time, Gary Lineker was suspended and reinstated in the space of a weekend for doing more or less exactly the same thing. Where was the equality in that, she must have wondered.

Similarly, Lineker’s Match of the Day colleague Jermaine Jenas was sacked for sending flirtatious text messages to female colleagues on The One Show. But just down the corridor in Broadcasting House, Huw Edwards was being kept on the payroll at enormous expense even though he’d admitted the far more serious transgression of paying a young person for explicit images.

The BBC justified this because Huw had committed no crime – at least not then. But neither had Jenas and if his impropriety was considered a sacking offence, Huw’s must have passed the threshold several times over.

It would be hard to imagine a more egregious example of double standards. But what happened was entirely typical of a timid, elitist management that will throw anyone whose face doesn’t fit straight under the next bus while excusing the indiscretions of a favoured few.

Indeed the BBC continued to protect Edwards even after it was told he was being prosecuted for making indecent images of children – a criminal offence for which he is currently awaiting sentence.

How could this have happened? Simply put, there was more at stake. Jenas was an outsider, a hired hand who had never been at the heart of BBC culture. His managers had no need to cover for him.

The same was true of Ms Vorderman at Radio Wales. Lineker, on the other hand, was an asset; a national treasure who lent his authority and considerable charm to a franchise that would otherwise be indistinguishable from the off-the-peg punditry of Sky Sports. No BBC manager would dare take him on.

Likewise, Edwards was seen as a cornerstone of the corporation’s credibility – though in truth he was little more than a stuffed suit reading the autocue. He left behind no body of work that might have been expected of someone in his position – no landmark documentaries, not even a turn hosting Mastermind. Yet his departure is by far the most damaging.

It’s not just the money, though that’s indictment enough. Criminal activity or not, his salary should have stopped the moment it became clear that his off-screen behaviour was at odds with his on-air sanctimony. Not so; he pocketed £200,000 even after his arrest.

Far worse was the travesty he has made of the BBC’s coverage of the coronation and the Queen’s funeral. His voice is all over them. It is inseparable from the pictures and it renders these priceless pieces of national history as unrepeatable as a 1970s edition of Top of the Pops.

And it’s not as if his bosses didn’t know before those events that Edwards was tainted. Complaints about him had already been made by a vulnerable woman he’d met online. He was told to cease contact but he persisted and pressured her to withdraw her allegations – as a result of which the BBC is now having to pay for her therapy. Rather too late it has admitted it could have warned him “more formally”.

It makes a nonsense of director-general Tim Davie’s insistence that the organisation will “never tolerate unacceptable behaviour of any kind”. He might have added, “until we’ve been found out and have absolutely no alternative”.

Meanwhile, we await news on the allegations that continue to smirch Strictly. How much longer can they dance around those?