The internet asked the right questions about Phillip Schofield – so why didn’t ITV?

Before the Culture and Media Sport select committee could begin two hours of staring down ITV’s big bosses and demanding that they must have known about Phillip Schofield because absolutely everybody knew about Phillip Schofield, they had to go through the formalities and declare if any of them had any conflict of interest to declare.

Four of the select committee had worked at ITV before, one as a news anchor. Practically all of the rest of them had accepted hospitality from the broadcaster over the years. Dame Caroline Dinenage, the chair of the committee, had done neither, but then again did have to say that she is the daughter of HOW! presenter Fred Dinenage, who until 18 months ago had worked there for more than 40 years.

The central question in the Phillip Schofield scandal hasn’t changed, nor moved on so much as a single centimetre, in the weeks if not months that no one has seemed to talk about anything else. And it’s this: “HOW DID THEY NOT KNOW?”

How did the people running ITV not know about a secret so open that Google’s auto-complete has been telling people about it for more than a year, whether they wanted to know or not.

To that end, it arguably didn’t help matters that a large number of the people doing the interrogating had to declare a clear interest in ITV-based gossip.

How could they not have known either?

ITV chief executive Dame Carolyn McCall was there, and she didn’t know. As was the network’s general counsel, Kyla Mullins, who didn’t know either. Having been watching these committees for quite a few years now I can tell you that, as a general rule, when they’ve had to bring a lawyer with them, it’s generally not going to go well.

And then there was Kevin Lygo, ITV’s director of television, who also definitely didn’t know.

And why did none of them know? Well, it turns out that when Phillip Schofield came out live on air in February 2020, there had been, Dame Carolyn explained, a lot of horrible things written online about Phillip Schofield, which she reckons made it difficult, impossible even, to spot that some of it was, while very mean-spirited and homophobic, also, to a large extent, factually accurate.

Lygo explained to the committee that back then, in the hours before Schofield’s coming out on live television, he had asked him if “there’s anything else we need to know, it’s fine if there is, we just don’t want to be blindsided by it”.

But Phillip had told him that there wasn’t and that was the end of it. What’s harder to answer is whether Mr Lygo actually believed him. It seems to me that it does not require the greatest amount of hindsight-based wisdom to work out that anyone with the nous to ask the question should probably also have the nous not to believe the answer.

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We would hear all about ITV’s duty of care policies for staff, about Dame Carolyn’s bi-weekly “vodcast” (no idea what that is, but she’ll probably need a double after today), about how anyone at ITV can just drop an email over to the “Ask Carolyn” email account, so how can there possibly be any problems? If no one had emailed her and said, “Erm, that thing that’s been all over the internet for years about your most highly paid star, you know the one who came out on your TV channel in a really quite unusual way, it’s true you know,” how can she have been expected to have cottoned on?

There was no reason, they explained, to think that anything was going wrong when this 19-year-old man turned up for work experience, declaring on his form to be a “family friend” of Phillip Schofield.

No one had investigated how Philip Schofield had followed him on social media when he was extremely young, because why would they?

Everyone had just believed him when they said nothing untoward was happening, because why wouldn’t they?

And anything they’d heard about a long-running affair between a runner and a star presenter almost 40 years his senior could safely be ignored as just mean, homophobic online gossip.

“We think he was asked the question 12 times and at each stage he categorically denied it,” said the lawyer, Kyla Mullins, who has evidently been asked to go through the relevant files and come back with an answer about how many times Phillip Schofield had been asked about whether or not these repeatedly alleged allegations were true, and found that the answer is at least 12, and that that’s probably therefore fine.

It is, of course, easy to be wise after the events. It’s also easy to say “everybody knew”, as Eamonn Holmes and others have done on other channels. Lygo was asked about this, and very dryly observed that presenters who’ve worked at ITV for a very long time, and who then find they no longer work there, are quite likely to claim it’s a terrible place to work, even though his most recent interaction with them tends to have involved them begging to be allowed to continue.

Of course, one could infer from that that the whole committee is simply bitter. That they’re all yearning to be back on ITV instead of BBC Parliament. But if they’ve had enough of toxic work environments, where the most senior staff are forced to resign because they’ve been lying to everyone, then it’s fair to say they might be disappointed.