‍INSIDE the tortured mind of disgraced newsreader Huw Edwards is a yearning to be understood.

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‍Edwards, 64, who got six months suspended for possessing indecent images of children, is unhappy at how his downfall was depicted in a Channel 5 drama.

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‍Now he is negotiating with Channel 4 to bring out a programme that will “state his case” and challenge “fabricated claims” contained in Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards.

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‍As a seasoned TV professional and the man at the epicentre of the BBC scandal that ruined him, it must be easy to pick holes in the Channel 5 drama, in which he was portrayed by Martin Clunes.

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‍But does anyone care? Two years after he announced the death of Queen Elizabeth on the BBC, Edwards was found to have 41 sexual images of children on his phone.

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‍Seven of them were in the most serious category of abuse. Two of the victims were aged seven to nine. Sexual offences against children are the ultimate taboo in most societies and ours is no exception.

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‍Most people regard it as unforgivable depravity. So what is Edwards, the grave, magisterial presence on the BBC’s flagship 10 o’clock news for fully 20 years, up to exactly?

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‍All through his trial and in his dealings with the young man who sent him the vile images on his phone, Edwards displayed iron control. It was freakish the way he chatted calmly with his police minders as they shepherded him through angry crowds to court.

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‍And now he wants to retain control of the narrative: To suggest that he is not just some grubby child sex offender but was once a man of substance in his career, albeit a flawed and damaged human being away from the adoring embrace of the BBC.

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‍In almost any other circumstances, you might feel some sympathy for Edwards. He suffered from clinical depression so serious that he required medication and psychotherapy somewhere safe and away from the glare of a disgusted public.

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‍A forensic psychosexual therapist and a consultant psychiatrist both declared Edwards to be a suicide risk and set out the reasons why. One said that Edwards recognised his personal and professional lives may have been “irretrievably damaged”. He thought his family might be better off if he were dead.

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‍Then there was the issue with his father. Hywel Teifi Edwards, an academic and Plaid Cymru and Welsh language activist. He was admired as a research professor of Welsh-language literature at University College of Swansea.

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‍“They fuck you up, your mum and dad,” wrote Philip Larkin in his poem This Be The Verse. In Edwards’s case, this seems to ring true.

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‍Psychiatrist Michael Isaac, in a report provided to the court, said: “Mr Edwards is a complex individual with a psychologically challenging upbringing, in which his relationship with his father was particularly challenging and probably damaging psychologically.

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‍“The restrictive, puritanical, but often hypocritical, background of growing up in the particular cultural milieu of South Wales, with a father who was highly regarded and lauded outside the family, but was perceived as behaving monstrously within the family, created […] low self-esteem.”

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‍Isaac said that Edwards felt inferior for failing to get into Oxford University and going instead to Cardiff. It made him “something of an outsider at the BBC”.

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‍Dr Victoria Appleyard, the sex therapist, who also gave a report to the court, claimed Edwards, despite being married to TV producer Vicky Flind and having five children with her, had an “unresolved sexual orientation”. He had a sexual interest in men, “which had been managed since 1994”.

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‍What triggered his shame and disgrace was, she said, “the process of commencing a social media presence”. This allowed him to manage his low mood and introduced him to men and women who were “motivated to be sexual with him”.

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‍The report said Edwards “engaged in sexual infidelities and became vulnerable to people blackmailing him”.

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‍In light of all this mental anguish and despair, the Chief Magistrate Paul Goldspring, sitting at Westminster Magistrates’ Court, pronounced such a lenient-seeming sentence that many thought Edwards had escaped too lightly.

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‍Indeed, some would have liked to see him banged up in the Scrubs – a gangland gorilla with a twinkle in his eye for a cellmate.

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‍The mother of a teenager allegedly groomed by Edwards told The Sun: "It’s absolutely disgusting Channel 4 has given a convicted paedophile a platform. I don’t understand what he has to say — or what his side of the story really is.

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‍“Who wants to hear that? And why would they agree to it? Whatever he says there’s no excuse for how he behaved — haven’t we been through enough?"

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‍She’s right, isn’t she? Edwards is said to have teamed up with a publicist in preparation for his Channel 4 outing. But he is deluded if he thinks it will alter how people think of him.

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‍He won’t be remembered as the commanding voice that brought us news of tragedy and majesty. He will forever be the pervert who scrolled child porn on his phone.

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‍*****

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‍Kate Moss, she of the Mount Rushmore cheekbones and the rackety personal life, has made a film about herself. And unlike most models, she wouldn’t hear of anyone applying the airbrush.

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‍So determined was she that the movie would tell the whole, unvarnished truth that as executive producer, she read each version of the script – and rewrote the dialogue for the sake of accuracy.

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‍Was that wise? Given the riotous life she led – parties, drugs, possibly inappropriate relationships – how much of it can she remember with crystal clarity?

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‍And as someone who, like Moss, was born in Croydon, South London, I can tell you that accurate dialogue from there might just earn her film  an X-rating.

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‍But no, she was adamant: “Yeah, let’s do it, let’s rock and roll, let’s not sanitise the story,” she told James Lucas, the director of Moss and Freud.

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‍The film is all about the time La Moss spent with Lucian Freud as he painted her reclining nude and pregnant on a bed, looking faintly bored or apathetic. It was hailed a fine work and fetched almost £4 million from an American collector.

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‍Freud , a father of 14, played by Sir Derek Jacobi in the film, was renowned as an old goat and there were whispers at the time of an unlikely relationship. But he was 80 and she was 28. Go figure.

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‍However, the picture is seen as a possible crossroads in Moss’s life, when she turned from model to muse. She had lived a hedonistic life until then – boyfriends included film star Johnny Depp, bad boy rocker Pete Doherty and photographer and socialite Nikolai von Bismarck.

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‍Former Daily Express editor Nick Lloyd once told me that Freud, grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund, had offered to paint his portrait while he was at Oxford.

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‍“I said no,” Lloyd went on with a wry smile and a shake of the head, which suggested everlasting regret.

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‍The film, which stars Ellie Bamber as Moss, is in cinemas on Friday.

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‍*****

‍Whitelock’s: The Cheshire Cheese of Leeds

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‍Eight of the best pubs in Leeds, read the headline in the Sunday Times.

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‍I wonder, I thought, scrolling through the choices.

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‍And sure enough, there it was. No. 4, Whitelock’s.

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‍It was once the pub of choice for journalists on the Yorkshire Post and the Yorkshire Evening Post. Unfortunately, that was the generation before mine when the papers were produced in nearby Albion Street.

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‍By the time I joined in 1972, we were in a Brutalist concrete cathedral of news on Wellington Street. A bit of a schlep to Whitelock’s, though I occasionally did it.

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‍The pub was up an alley called Turk’s Head Yard and in the late morning Yorkshire Post executives could be found chewing over ideas at the bar, preparatory to lunch. Late afternoons, the Evening Post crowd descended.

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‍Keith Waterhouse would sometimes pop in and John Betjeman called the pub “the Leeds equivalent of Fleet Street’s Old Cheshire Cheese and far less self-conscious… It is the very heart of Leeds.”

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‍Judging by the Sunday Times’s picture, it’s still a proper pub too.

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‍RICHARD DISMORE

‍27 May 2026