Any one of the scandals that has rocked the BBC in the past five years could have been enough to force director-general Tim Davie to resign.

The admission that his top newsreader was a paedophile. His repeated failure to rein in the political grandstanding of its best-known sports commentator. Vile sexual behaviour by leading presenters.

Even the discovery that Diana, Princess of Wales, had been duped 30 years ago into giving an interview with a BBC reporter armed with forged financial documents.

But until the 58-year-old former Pepsi executive fell on his sword last night, it seemed nothing that happened on his watch as head of the British Broadcasting Corporation could shame him into quitting his £540,000-a-year post – earning him the nickname ‘Teflon Tim’.

What finished him was a devastating leaked 8,000-word dossier compiled by former journalist Michael Prescott when he was an independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board.

Prescott presented proof that BBC1’s Panorama, its flagship current affairs show, doctored footage of a speech by Donald Trump on the day of the US Capitol riots – making it appear the President had directly called for violence and pledged to take part himself.

The most awful aspect of the Trump travesty was how predictable it seemed. Since Tim Davie took over as director-general in September 2020, the BBC has been tarred by scandals that damaged the reputation of almost all its departments: sports, news, music, radio and prime-time entertainment.

Radio 4 Today host Nick Robinson claimed last week that the broadcaster was under attack from political enemies. In fact, the opposite was true.

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Any one of the scandals that has rocked the BBC in the past five years could have been enough to force director-general Tim Davie to resign

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Trump celebrated in the wake of the announcement

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Mr Trump also shared a Daily Mail column from Boris Johnson, where the former Prime Minister vowed to withhold his licence fee over the impartiality issue

In every case, the harm was done from within, by staff who, under Davie’s leadership, no longer appeared able to tell the difference between right and wrong.

In the past two years, the scandals have come so quickly that each one displaced the last. In order to weather the storm, the DG had only to hang on until the next one blew up. He was repeatedly rescued by his own inability to get a grip.

His entire career can be seen as an example of what management types call ‘failing upwards’ – a form of promotion built on blithe confidence in his own inadequacies.

After being privately educated at the Whitgift School in South Croydon – which currently charges boarders £50,000 a year – he attended Cambridge University and joined US multinational Procter & Gamble as a marketing trainee in 1991.

Two years later, he went to PepsiCo, where he oversaw the European launch of the Pepsi Blue rebranding.

Pepsi Blue publicity stunts included painting an Air France Concorde in Pepsi Blue livery, putting a Pepsi banner on the Mir space station and roping in supermodels including Cindy Crawford and Claudia Schiffer.

The campaign cost an estimated £200 million and was widely regarded as a flop.

Davie made a foray into politics, standing twice for a seat on Hammersmith & Fulham Borough Council in London. He lost both times.

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Tim Davie is pictured arriving for work in November 2012 when he was the BBC’s Acting Director-General

In 2005, he was appointed as the BBC’s director of marketing, communications and audiences, a title straight out of the sitcom W1A.

Moving to become director of audio and music in 2009, he tried to shut down Radio 6 Music, the channel beloved of serious pop and rock aficionados, as well as the Asian Network. Both survived his assaults and have gone on to post record listening figures.

After George Entwistle stepped down as director-general in 2012 over the BBC’s flailing attempts to cover-up Jimmy Savile’s horrific sex crimes, Davie spent six months as acting DG.

Among his duties was mopping up the mess after a Newsnight report wrongly implied former Tory party treasurer Lord McAlpine was guilty of child abuse.

By 2019, Davie was head of BBC Studios and the corporation’s highest paid executive, earning £642,000. He took a pay cut when he was appointed in 2020 to succeed the beleaguered Tony Hall.

A few months earlier, it was reported, he turned down the chance to be chief executive of the Premier League.

Davie is a keen ultra-runner, a veteran of numerous marathons. Perhaps his immunity to exhaustion helped him to keep blundering on through scandal after scandal.

It’s hard to imagine, for instance, that any of his 26 predecessors could have shrugged off the national outrage after BBC iPlayer broadcast several minutes of anti-Israeli chanting at Glastonbury.

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The BBC came under fire after it broadcast Bob Vylan’s ‘deeply-offensive’ chant of ‘death to the IDF’ at Glastonbury

The rap duo Bob Vylan led the festival crowd in a repeated chorus of ‘Death, death to the IDF [Israeli Defence Forces]’, while BBC cameras kept turning.

Davie apologised, saying: ‘I deeply regret that such offensive and deplorable behaviour appeared on the BBC.’

Davie certainly didn’t think of quitting when newsreader Huw Edwards was signed off work on full salary, after it was revealed he paid thousands of pounds to a teenager for explicit pictures from when he was 17.

It later transpired that junior members of staff at the BBC had long regarded Edwards as a predator.

By the time he was found guilty of possessing child porn images, he had resigned, but refused to hand back an estimated £200,000 in pay received while on medical leave.

A second sex scandal involved Masterchef presenter Gregg Wallace. Numerous women reported humiliating encounters with Wallace, who would sometimes expose himself to female colleagues, as well as making deeply unpleasant and suggestive comments.

That prompted Davie to announce feebly that the BBC would not ‘tolerate behaviour that is not in line with our values’. Wallace was ousted, as was co-host John Torode, after being accused of using racist slurs.

Perhaps Davie’s most humiliating moment came in March 2023, when he attempted to censure Gary Lineker for a stream of blatantly political posts on social media, including one that accused then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman of using ‘language not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s’ about immigrants.

Davie suspended Lineker, the BBC’s highest paid presenter, from hosting Match Of The Day. That prompted such a backlash from colleagues and fellow pundits that the DG backed down within days.

Lineker was back on MotD the following Saturday, as Davie explained limply, ‘I’ve spent time talking to Gary and we’ve had lots of discussion. Between now and when the review report is out, Gary will abide by the editorial guidelines’.

For five years, Tim Davie allowed the BBC’s core values to be undermined, knocked down and trampled.

The weakness of his leadership gave employees free rein to disregard any rule they wanted. What else will come to light now that he’s gone is anybody’s guess.