Malcolm Cupis: Trump has vindicated my view that the BBC is biased and belligerent

Malcolm Cupis is a public relations consultant, strategist and writer. He stood as a Reform UK candidate in 2024 and was a constituency chairman. He resigned from Reform UK in February 2025

The scandal at the BBC that has erupted, and the subsequent resignation of Director General Tim Davie and News CEO Deborah Turness has come as no surprise to me.

The fact that this has come about due to the BBC deliberately misrepresenting the President of the United States, not only the world’s most powerful man but also quite possibly the world’s most litigious, is satisfying on the basis that it has finally made the BBC accountable and their open bias overt, but it’s also bittersweet for the legions of people, like me, who have been deliberately misrepresented by the organisation and whose lives have been directly affected as a result.

My life has been turned upside down ever since the BBC chose to execute a hatchet job on me when I was a Parliamentary Candidate for Reform, a few weeks before the general election last year.

I was one of several Reform candidates who suddenly found that they were subjected to intense scrutiny by an organisation that was clearly determined to drag up anything that could possibly be used as confirmation bias of their entrenched political attitude.

In my case this took the form of a story about a historical tweet I had made some years previously, which they chose to carefully craft a story around in an obvious attempt to smear me.

The tweet was made three years before Reform existed.

A family member had contacted me upset because she had come home and found her then 12 year old daughter in front of a laptop rapping along to a YouTube video with lyrics that can only be described as nauseating and pornographic and copying the truly revolting movements of the performers.

In industrial language at the time I commented on the performers and stated that such disgusting things should not be freely available to impressionable children on social media. I also made the point that failing to confront this helped to perpetuate it, and that people were failing to confront it because they were scared of being called racist.

When I became a candidate for Reform, I reviewed my social media and chose not to do the simple thing and delete this post.

Why? Because it wasn’t illegal, it expressed a strongly held view, Reform themselves had stated that they were committed to making sure that such things were not available to children on social media and the party continually reinforced that it demanded free speech. As a person who has the courage of their convictions I decided that I would not be a hypocrite and remove it.

So when the BBC ran the story, pointedly referring to the performers simply as “dancing women” what they accused me of was being “offensive”. Not of breaking any law. So everything would be fine…right?

I expected Reform to do what Reform says it does, demand free speech and stand behind its candidate. So it was a shock when they immediately decided not to, and that basically threw me to the wolves. The next thing I knew The Times and The Independent also picked up on the story and further embellished it. The Times in particular highlighting that the performers were black, in order to justify suggestions that I am a racist a well as a sexist.

In the days that followed I was deluged with abuse on social media, to the great distress of my wife, family and friends. I also suffered in a more direct way – I am a PR consultant and most of my clients immediately cancelled their contracts with me. I was then warned by Gawain Towler that Reform were considering chucking me out, even though it was only a month before the general election.

In the event, they chose not to do that, but my polling went down by about 15 per cent in the last month of the election. I believe that what took place directly affected the democratic process.

After the election, having performed well, Reform made my constituency one of the national pilots for creating a branch and made me Chairman, but I was warned that I was still operating under an amber warning. I built the association rapidly, staging events, raising funds, greatly increasing membership but then, ahead of the local elections last May, was told that I had failed vetting and could not stand as a candidate, despite being told that if I did not stand I could not be reselected as Parliamentary Candidate. No reason was given for me failing vetting and I was told I was not entitled to be told. Several of the candidates I had found also failed with no explanation.

That was the last straw that led to my resignation. I can’t contemplate supporting an organisation that doesn’t support its own people, can’t be honest with them and, in particular, shows such a level of hypocrisy that it states it demands freedom of speech and then acts against its own candidates and officers for historically speaking freely.

But the architects of this, make no mistake, were the BBC. It was their decision to desperately look for any opportunity to smear and discredit people who simply had a political perspective that they disagree with.

I was not a politician; I was a normal human being who had got involved in politics because I love my country and my county.

The effect has been pronounced.

The headlines remain at the top of Google to this day. Despite having great experience and having been highly successful as a PR consultant in the past, I am finding it verging on impossible to pick up any work. It directly led to me leaving Reform UK. The only good thing about it is that it woke me up to the truth about that party and led to me turning my allegiance and energy to Advance, which is full of other good people many of whom have been similarly treated. The stories written by the BBC, The Independent and The Times remain constantly available and I continue to face regular abuse as a result. I have been fundamentally cancelled in my career and have now closed my business.

Ultimately though I don’t have a few million to pursue a libel claim, and OFCOM has proved to be utterly disinterested. The BBC has marched on, ever more overtly politically biased in my view and utterly unaccountable to the very many people who resent being forced to finance it on penalty of imprisonment.

For every Donald Trump I’m sure there are countless thousands of MalcolmCupis’s, who have been subjected to this kind of treatment, and left to suffer the consequences. And for that reason I’m quite happy to state that the headlines of the last ten days have left me feeling greatly vindicated and have given me significant satisfaction.