Make or break time for Samir Shah

Monday’s appearance before the House of Commons Select Committee in London may determine whether Samir Shah survives as Chair of the BBC Board.

In just a fortnight, the corporation has already lost its Director‑General, Tim Davie, and its Head of News, Deborah Turness. Now, following last night’s dramatic resignation of board member Shumeet Banerji — also of Indian origin, like Shah — the BBC’s governance crisis has escalated to the point where MPs sense a third senior scalp.

Shah is no lightweight. A respected programme‑maker with decades of experience inside and around the BBC, he was appointed chair precisely because he was seen as a steady, reform‑minded figure capable of restoring trust after years of turbulence.

Banerji quit over “governance issues,” but in Westminster that phrase has a sharp edge. His letter is understood to reflect frustration over how the board handled a key memo on broadcasting standards, the Panorama Trump‑speech edit controversy, and even his exclusion from crucial discussions surrounding the resignations of Davie and Turness. The timing — on the eve of Shah’s most important public appearance — was no coincidence. It was a warning shot.

Sir Craig Oliver, the former editor of BBC One’s Ten O’Clock News, was blunt in his assessment, warning that “so far it looks like he’s been very weak and he has failed to actually get up and control the board.” For the BBC to lose its director general, its head of news, and now possibly the chair just months before Charter renewal would amount to an institutional breakdown.

Yet the current turmoil does not exist in a vacuum. It comes at the very moment a new book about the BBC’s most notorious failure has landed in bookstores. Andy Webb’s Dianarama, published just days ago, revisits the 1995 interview in which BBC reporter Martin Bashir gained access to Princess Diana through an elaborate web of deceit.

Bashir forged bank statements and deployed fabricated allegations to play on Diana’s fears, convincing her that people close to her were being paid to spy on her. The interview became a global sensation, and the cover-up that followed became one of the gravest scandals in BBC history.

Webb’s book argues that the real failure was not Bashir alone but the senior leadership that protected him. Warning signs were ignored. Whistleblowers were sidelined. Governors chose silence, allowing a damaging narrative to take root. The echoes with today’s predicament are uncomfortably clear: delayed responses, confused governance, and resignations that suggest a leadership unable to steady itself.

Today MPs will press Shah on why he took no decisive action months ago when the Panorama Trump-edit issue was first raised. They will also ask why he presided over a period of silence after Prescott’s memo leaked, even as BBC executives wanted to address the issue swiftly and publicly.

Shah may argue that these matters are technical; yet Dianarama shows that such crises are never merely technical. They reveal a culture, one that either confronts problems or buries them.

This is why the Select Committee hearing has acquired such symbolic weight. The BBC promises that lessons were learned from the Diana affair. Webb’s book suggests that the deeper habits — hesitation, evasion, and the hope that controversy will simply fade — remain embedded.

It is also striking that both Shah and Banerji, two British citizens of Indian origin, were meant to embody a modern, diverse, outward-looking BBC. Instead, they now appear on opposite sides of a public rupture about governance and responsibility. Their presence at the heart of the crisis underscores how leadership, not identity, is the defining issue.

If Shah speaks clearly, forcefully and with contrition today, he may yet restore confidence in the BBC’s ability to govern itself. If he stumbles, he could become the third casualty in a crisis that spans both past and present: The Bashir-Diana scandal that scarred the corporation and today’s questions about impartiality, standards and institutional strength.

Either way, the reckoning has arrived. And today, in a committee room in Westminster, the BBC will learn whether it has truly escaped the ghosts of 1995, or whether those ghosts still set the rhythm of its public life.