Rumour Mills
BBC in crisis , Issue 1673 THE BBC was initially tight-lipped about why it had sacked Scott Mills as presenter of the Radio 2 Breakfast Show. Even the Mirror, which broke the story, took the best part of a day to specify exactly what the accusation was (having been investigated by police several years earlier over alleged sexual offences against a teenager, but not prosecuted due to lack of evidence).

Enthusiastic BBC-basher the Telegraph threw itself into this news vacuum, carrying a front- page report on 1 April claiming that "BBC knew about Mills allegation a year ago".

In fact, as the BBC confirmed, it had been aware of the investigation way back in 2017. But the Telegraph was referring to an entirely different allegation, and a strikingly vague one at that.

"A former BBC presenter contacted the corporation in May 2025 to say she had received information about alleged 'inappropriate communications' involving Mills", and asking "whether it had ever conducted an internal investigation into him."

As the paper noted, the BBC has now "admitted her information 'should have been followed up and we should have asked further questions'."

Strong Brees
So why didn't it? One reason may be that the "former BBC presenter" in question was Anna Brees, who has parlayed her year and a half working for two local BBC stations until 2011, and a longer period prior to that with ITV in Birmingham, into two parallel careers: as a trainer of small businesses on how to make promotional videos on mobile phones, and as an enthusiastic conspiracy theorist with a particular interest in accusing the mainstream media, and the BBC in particular, of all manner of wrongdoing and cover-ups.

Eye readers may recall Brees as the re-publisher of a memoir by one Matt Tarraga, into which she inserted a new chapter claiming he was the victim of paedophile crimes by former prime minister Edward Heath, cheerfully admitting to the Eye in 2019 that "I knew this would draw attention to his story and it has" (Eye 1425).

The following year, when she had become an avowed anti-masking and anti-lockdown campaigner who promoted videos on the subject of 5G signals and "plandemics" on her YouTube channel, we described her as someone who "has never met a conspiracy theory she didn't like".

And indeed in an interview online Brees details how an ex-boyfriend had turned her on to "the truth behind 9/11... and I started to open my mind to some of these issues: do aliens exist, what happened to Princess Diana, JFK."

Corporation attacks
More significantly, she has regularly levelled some spectacular accusations at the BBC, including claiming Panorama "fabricated" an incident in which the Syrian regime bombed a hospital in 2013, including "faking injuries to children"; claiming that the same programme doctored a document to exaggerate the extent of antisemitism in Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, and attempted to bribe interviewees to traduce far-right agitator Tommy Robinson.

Brees did, however, ensure that this was all more difficult to establish for anyone who followed up the Telegraph's scoop: on the day the paper was published, she deleted her entire X account, complete with all her past conspiracising.