Fear and loathing inside the BBC after Emily Maitlis broadside exposes a divided newsroom 

Deborah Turness will arrive next week to find staff split over impartiality, and unrest at flagship programmes 

There was an awkward moment after Emily Maitlis, the former Newsnight presenter, gave her speech at the Edinburgh television festival on Wednesday.

Fresh from delivering the MacTaggart lecture — in which she referred to “Tory cronyism at the heart of the BBC” — she was whisked away to the after-speech dinner. Arriving early at the National Museum of Scotland, she found only one person waiting outside: Richard Sharp, chairman of the BBC and a Tory donor. Maitlis and her podcast partners, fellow BBC escapees Jon Sopel and Dino Sofos, had to make small talk with Sharp for about 20 minutes.

Maitlis, 51, who announced in February that she was leaving the BBC to join Global, the owner of LBC, has reignited a debate about impartiality at the corporation just before the arrival next week of Deborah Turness, its new chief executive of news and current affairs.

Turness, 55, who is joining from ITN, is accepting a poisoned chalice, particularly as the BBC is coming under financial strain that will only worsen with the licence fee frozen at £159 a year for the next two years during a period of high inflation. She is inheriting a news room that is ideologically divided about impartiality, in the midst of a “modernisation plan” dubbed “the great re-disorganisation” by staff, and which is haemorrhaging presenters and producers in a mammoth voluntary redundancy scheme.

The toxic issue of pay, or rather the disparity between what “the talent” and other staff receive, will flare again as the cost of living soars. Individual programmes are likely to cause headaches: BBC2’s Newsnight is in turmoil — expensive to make but with a tiny audience — while Radio 4’s Today programme is experiencing behind-the-scenes antagonism between its presenters.

Then there is the merger of the News Channel with BBC World, which has provoked warnings that staff could strike over the resulting cuts.

The BBC has been without an official head of news since January when Fran Unsworth departed, with Jonathan Munro stepping up in an interim role. Insiders complain that because the director-general Tim Davie, 55, is not a news man, there has been too little scrutiny of Munro’s decisions. Davie has been nicknamed “Lord Pepsi” by hacks who see him as an ad man (he was marketing manager for PepsiCo) “doing the job to get a seat in the House of Lords”.

“The problem with Tim is he knows how to sell stuff, not to create it,” said one. “He’s doesn’t ‘get’ news and that’s partly why it’s in such a mess now.”