Former BBC newsreader Simon McCoy has claimed that Huw Edwards “put a stop” to a planned series the day before it was set to launch.

McCoy, who presented various BBC News programmes between 2004 and 2021 before moving to GB News, recalled the incident during a podcast interview with The Times’s Matt Forde.

Speaking on the Political Party podcast, McCoy recalled: “The show was going to be called Afternoon Live with Simon McCoy, but there was one presenter at the BBC, very senior, who put a stop to it the day before.

“Management caved,” he continued, “and that was a frustration of how that place [the BBC] worked.”

McCoy said that the presenter in question was now-disgraced news anchor Huw Edwards, who left the organisation in 2024 amid a police investigation into offences related to indecent images of children. Edwards eventually pleaded guilty and received a prison sentence of six months, suspended for two years.

“We weren’t particularly close,” McCoy said, “but it sort of summed up how, even within your own colleagues, there was a real mistrust – ‘Who the hell does he think he is?’, basically.”

Forde then asked if he thought Edwards had intervened in McCoy’s prospective BBC show because he was “jealous or threatened”.

“I’ve always said about Huw, for a man with the most secure job in British television, he was the most insecure man I’ve ever met.

“He could be charming, he was witty, he was funny, and good company, but what's happened is terrible for all those concerned.”

McCoy added that it was “ridiculous” for Edwards to have considered him a professional competitor.

“I was never a threat to Huw Edwards,” he said. “But it shows how powerful he was. He was the most senior newsreader at the BBC, and there were the producers and others who were in awe of that, and sort of pandered to that.”

The Independent has contacted the BBC for comment.

After leaving the BBC in March 2021, McCoy fronted his own series on GB News for several months, parting ways with the broadcaster in December 2021, citing “personal reasons”.

Edwards came under fire this week after revealing that he had entered a Welsh poetry competition under a pseudonym in a bid to “correct” the “toxic narrative” about him in the media.

While Edwards did not win the contest, which required all entrants to remain anonymous during the assessment process, his decision to take part was strongly criticised, with Welsh actor Sera Cracroft claiming it would have been “catastrophic” for the former BBC presenter to have won.