Jeremy Vine urges BBC presenter to step forward to protect colleagues

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Jeremy Vine has urged his fellow BBC presenter at the heart of a scandal engulfing the broadcaster to come forward to protect his colleagues.

The crisis began last Friday after the Sun newspaper accused an anonymous male presenter of paying a young person “more than ?35,000 in return for sordid images”.

On Tuesday night, the Sun published claims from a separate young person that the presenter visited them during lockdown in February 2021. In another front page story on Wednesday, it alleges the presenter met the young person on a dating app and travelled across London to another county to meet them at their flat during tier 3 lockdown. It also claims the male presenter sent cash and asked for a picture.

BBC News published separate allegations earlier on Tuesday that a person in their early 20s had felt “threatened” by the same prominent presenter after they connected via an online dating app. They reported that the household name sent expletive-filled messages after the young person alluded to considering naming him online.

Speaking on his Channel 5 show on Wednesday morning, Vine said: “Bizarrely, as I understand it, even if the presenter is sacked, the BBC may not be allowed to name them.

“So this is why it keeps coming back to the presenter and … he has to show some degree of concern for those people, and I’m one of them, who have been falsely accused.”

Vine added: “At the moment, because this presenter hasn’t identified himself and has not been identified, you could almost say anything about the person and we are going to have, if this isn’t closed off, this story, we will have a Carl Beech-figure arrive at it, without a doubt, and you will have some extraordinary, untrue allegation which won’t be answered.”

Posting on Twitter on Tuesday evening, Vine urged the presenter to come forward, saying that fresh allegations would result in “yet more vitriol being thrown at perfectly innocent colleagues” and that the BBC was “on its knees with this”.

Vine is one of several leading names at the broadcaster, including Gary Lineker, Nicky Campbell and Rylan Clark, who have publicly stated they are not the presenter in question.

Richard Bacon, who was sacked by the BBC in 1998 from his job presenting Blue Peter after a tabloid sting over cocaine use, was more empathic towards the presenter.

He wrote to Vine: “Stop it. You’re more emotionally intelligent than this. We don’t know the complexities of what his family are going through. Or what dark thoughts are running through his head. Irrespective of what he’s done wrong. You can walk off people wrongly guessing it’s you for 5 minutes.”

The treasury minister Victoria Atkins said the situation had been exacerbated by social media users naming people they suspected of involvement: “There is this real problem, that I think we as a society have to face, as to the impact on innocent people when allegations of this sort are made and people try to work out who is at the centre of the allegations.”

She refused to comment to Sky News on whether the presenter should come forward but said there was a role for social media firms “to see what they are doing and checking on their platforms”.

Atkins cautioned that MPs should be “very careful” about using parliamentary privilege to identify the presenter, saying they had to remember the “huge responsibility” they have.

A lawyer for the young person at the heart of the original story has since said the accusations printed in the Sun were “rubbish” but the individual’s family, who went to the paper, are standing by their account.

Both the Sun and BBC said the presenter had been approached for comment.