Mick Hartley

Meet James Purnell, the new captain of Burnham’s squad – and the man who pushed for the BBC to embrace Stonewall.

In 2018, Purnell sponsored a review of the treatment and career advancement of gay and transgender employees at the BBC. In the foreword to the LGBT culture and progression report, he wrote of the need to have an “inclusive culture”, arguing that this would help to attract young viewers to the BBC.

“An organisation that appears to have a heteronormative culture is not one that is going to cut ice with them either as a consumer or an employee,” Purnell wrote. 

The report said that the BBC should aim to be included in the Stonewall Top 100 Workplace Equality Index and that staff would be encouraged to wear badges and adopt email signatures to identify themselves as “straight allies”.

This provoked concern among some older, mostly female employees. “Purnell talked about inclusion and diversity — but he wasn’t interested in including us, and our ‘diverse’ views about biological reality,” a former BBC journalist recalled.

When Purnell sent an all-staff message on the internal intranet service encouraging employees to show they were “allies” on their email signatures, this prompted some staff to add their pronouns.

Gender-critical staff claimed this breached impartiality, as reporters were semi-publicly taking sides on a contested issue. Some do not feel Purnell listened to their complaints, seeing them as “middle-aged women being bigoted”. When he met with a group of concerned female journalists, they said he spent most of the meeting “staring out of the window”.

Not to worry, though: he’s “brilliantly analytical”, and possesses a “proper policy brain”.