BRYONY GORDON: This is the sickening truth about Huw Edwards. It's time someone said it - so I will
How many times did you grimace while watching Power: The Downfall Of Huw Edwards?
I’m afraid that by the time Martin Clunes’ dramatised version of the disgraced newsreader had asked a vulnerable young teenager to refer to him as ‘daddy’ – just 22 minutes in – I had already lost count of all the moments I felt myself physically recoil.
Alas, there was to be another hour and ten minutes of these stomach-churning incidents before the excruciatingly creepy Channel 5 film drew to its depressing close.
What made the programme all the more disturbing was the knowledge that everything on screen had actually happened. The 90-minute film is based on extensive interviews with the boy in question, his family, and the journalists who worked tirelessly to get the truth about the once highly respected BBC newsreader out there.
You’d think that, given the circumstances – in 2024, Edwards was convicted of making indecent images of children – the former BBC stalwart might choose to keep a low profile right now.
Most people who had committed such a crime and managed to get off with a suspended prison sentence might quietly count their blessings that a Channel 5 (not even Hulu or HBO!) docudrama was the extent of their punishment.
But as we now know, Huw Edwards does not consider himself ‘most people’. He appears to view himself as special and different, still smarting in his 60s about his difficult childhood and the fact he didn’t get into Oxford.
Even as he is convicted of a crime, he cannot stop seeing himself as a victim. How else to explain the bleating statement he made to the Daily Mail this week about the Channel 5 show?
Huw Edwards was sentenced to a six-month jail sentence suspended for two years at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in September 2024
‘[The production company] made no attempt to check with me the truth of any aspect of their narrative before going ahead with the production …Channel 5’s “factual drama” is hardly likely to convey the reality of what happened.’
But why would anyone in their right mind rely on Edwards for truth, facts or reality?
Any hint of gravitas and respectability well and truly disappeared when he admitted accessing indecent images of children as young as seven.
Now the 64-year-old has taken on a publicist, with one newspaper reporting that he hopes to make a documentary ‘in which he will claim that mental illness played a crucial role in his behaviour’.
Pass me a diazepam. It wasn’t as if Mr Edwards gave a Welsh tea cake for the mental health of his alleged victim, not to mention his estranged wife and five children.
As someone who has campaigned for years to try to erase the stigma around mental health, I find entitled, powerful men playing the mental health card particularly offensive.
Not least to the legions of people who have suffered from mental illness and never once found themselves in possession of criminal Category A images of children.
We’ve seen this before, of course. When Harvey Weinstein stood trial for rape in 2020, the defence tried to claim he was a sex addict, rather than a sex offender.
Martin Clunes played the disgraced broadcaster in the Channel 5 drama Power: The Downfall Of Huw Edwards
People undoubtedly do bad things while mentally unwell, and in the grip of addiction. But it’s what they choose to do after these terrible moments that is the true mark of a person. Do they face the consequences of their behaviour and make amends for it? Or do they try to explain it away?
Edwards may have said in his statement to the Daily Mail that his history of mental illness is not an excuse for his ‘reprehensible’ crime. But he has not apologised to the vulnerable drug user who claims he was just 17 years old when he was paid by Edwards for sexual images.
Hurt people hurt people – everyone from Freud to Jung to the latest wellbeing influencer on Instagram has told us this. Should all convicted criminals escape prison because of the difficulties they themselves experienced as children?
Of course it’s tragic Edwards seems to have internalised so much of the rampant homophobia he must have grown up around. Nobody for a moment doubts that such struggles might have led to periods of deep depression and extreme shame.
And yet he is a grown man, and an immensely privileged one at that.
For all his arguments that it was privilege that put him in this terrible situation – he says his position led to strangers online offering him sexual gratification – there was another privileged path he could have chosen, one that would have led him to take advantage of some of the best mental health resources money could buy.
Some of the £475,000 he earned each year from the BBC could have been spent on extremely good psychotherapy. Instead, Edwards chose to spend it on gifts he gave to the convicted sex offender who sent him the indecent images of children.
Until he understands that it is these children who are the victims, not him, then I’m afraid he has no right to lecture anyone about mental health.
Unlike Sienna, I'm glad I had my baby before 40
Sienna Miller at The Fashion Awards, hosted at the Royal Albert Hall in December last year
Congratulations to Sienna Miller, who is pregnant with her third child at 44 and making it look completely effortless in the process. ‘Having had a baby at 29, and then having a baby at 42, and now 44, it’s so much easier,’ she told a magazine this week. I’m not convinced (and nor are my perimenopausal ovaries). If everything is better in your 40s, it’s largely because you’re no longer having to get up 15 times a night to feed a baby.
The one trend I have mastered
'Bed-scaping' is the new 'table-scaping', with stripe bedding and yellow bedding among the fastest-rising search terms
Data from Pinterest shows ‘curated bedding’ is the latest trend for influencers wanting to show off their aesthetic. ‘Stripe bedding’ and ‘yellow bedding’ are among the fastest-rising search terms, and apparently ‘bed-scaping’ is the new ‘table-scaping’. For once, I’m well ahead of the curve. I’ve been ‘bed-scaping’ for years – or as we like to call it in our house: ‘making the bed’.
World Cup kit that will cost you £35,000
There has been outrage at the cost of the new England shirts for this summer’s World Cup: £104.99, and you can’t even guarantee they’re going to get near the quarter finals.
England footballer Dominic Calvert-Lewin arrives at St Georges Park with a £35,000 Hermes bag
Then there’s the new Three Lions favourite accessory as sported by star players Dominic Calvert-Lewin (pictured) and Declan Rice – if you really want to look like an England footballer this summer, you better be prepared to part with a cool £35,000 for a giant Hermès bag!
Told off by my own daughter!
I told my 12-year-old the results of a survey which has found that a quarter of teens have never emptied the dishwasher. Meanwhile, a third haven’t so much as hung up the washing, and 55 per cent refuse to clean their own rooms. ‘Stop hating on the younger generations,’ my daughter sighed. ‘It’s so uncool!’ Don’t worry, darling – just another 20 years or so and it will be your turn to whinge about young folk.
