Tim Walker

Mandrake

Open Secret

On a point of order, Martin Clunes will not be the first actor to play Huw Edwards in the forthcoming Channel 5 drama, Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards. That distinction, I would submit, belongs to the former Archers actor Graham Seed, who played a character called Huw, who happened to be married to a woman named Vicky, by whom he had five children – all of which was also true of the real Edwards – in my play Bloody Difficult Women that was staged in London and then in Edinburgh in 2022.

The Huw that Seed played also used his power to attempt to lure young men into his bed, but Edwards was more the inspiration for his character than the exact model – he was a senior civil servant in the drama about Gina Miller’s legal action against Theresa May’s Government over Brexit – but, a year before the Edwards story broke, it still attracted a large number of senior BBC figures who were clearly in on the ‘secret’.

As exhaustively as the BBC claimed to have investigated the Edwards scandal after it was exposed, no one at the corporation troubled to ask me how I knew about it in early 2022 or, for that matter, all the smirking BBC bigwigs who came to see it.

In all honesty, it was hard to think who in the BBC newsroom wasn’t aware of what was going on.