BBC in damage control on false report

The head of the BBC admitted yesterday it faced a "crisis of trust" after its flagship news programme wrongly implicated a British politician in child sex abuse, just weeks after the Jimmy Savile scandal broke.

Britain's public broadcaster has suspended all investigations by its current affairs programme Newsnight following the report that Director-General George Entwistle has condemned as "fundamentally wrong".

Newsnight was already under scrutiny for dropping an investigation last year into abuse claims against the late Savile, one of the BBC's biggest stars who has now been accused of sexually abusing hundreds of children over four decades.

Last week, Newsnight reported allegations by a man, Steve Messham, that he had been repeatedly abused by a senior Conservative party figure from the 1980s when he was a teenager living in the Bryn Estyn children's home in Wales.

Although the programme did not identify the politician, it sparked a frenzy of speculation leading to former Tory party treasurer Alistair McAlpine, an aide to Margaret Thatcher, being widely named on social networking websites.

McAlpine went public on Friday to strongly deny the claims, and hours later Messham said after seeing a photograph of McAlpine that he had been mistaken.

Messham offered his "sincere and humble" apologies to McAlpine and suggested it was the police who wrongly identified the politician as his alleged abuser back in the early 1990s.