A Conservative Party spokesperson said: “Reform are a one-man band with no plan for the economy – and it shows. Just days after their economic ‘reset’, they have reverted to type and announced more unfunded spending commitments.

“Reform’s policies will drive up welfare, drive up borrowing and drive up taxes, making things even harder for the businesses we rely on to drive growth.”

A Labour Party spokesperson said: “Nigel Farage will say anything to get a headline, but Reform’s current plans would be a disaster for small businesses.

“Farage would rip up Labour’s deal with the EU leaving small businesses drowning in red tape, and his war on clean energy jobs would see SMEs in the energy sector and wider supply chain shut down across the country. Reform are not on the side of business or ordinary working people.”

Downing Street has told journalists:

– The Prime Minister has full confidence in Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy, the Justice Secretary

– PM first heard news about the latest mistaken release bungle on plane on the way to Brazil

– ⁠Three offenders still remain at large

The Prime Minister’s spokesman has given Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s response to the BBC row. He said:

– The PM doesn’t think the BBC is biased

– Nor does he believe it is corrupt

– The Beeb must act swiftly to correct mistakes following recent scandals

– Sir Keir hasn’t spoken to Donald Trump about the matter

– It’s vital the license fee payers trust what they see

– Doesn’t rule out the licence fee being on the negotiating table in the upcoming BBC Charter Review

– The PM describes the BBC as a “national institution” that must be protected by the government

Nigel Farage warned that more and more people will stop paying the BBC licence fee.

He said: “If the BBC doesn’t now get a grip, get somebody in from the outside, somebody who has got a history and a culture of changing organisations, of turning them around, then I think what you would see within the next couple of years are many, many millions just refusing, just not wanting to have the license fee.”

He said the current model “cannot survive” and is “wholly unsustainable”.

Nigel Farage blasted the BBC for having been “institutionally biased for decades”.

The Reform leader also said he had spoken with US president Donald Trump on Friday about the row over the way one of his speeches was edited for the Panorama programme.

Mr Farage said: “I actually spoke to the president on Friday. He just said to me: ‘Is this how you treat your best ally?’ It’s quite a powerful comment.”

Nigel Farage warned that EU rules and regulations had made things tougher for businesses.

The Reform UK leader said: “It’s actually a double problem. It isn’t just the EU rulebook, big problem though that is, it is the massive over-interpretation of that rulebook by regulators, by quangos, by bureaucrats in this country.

“And you speak to people out there working in all sorts of businesses and the regulators aren’t there to work with business. Their culture is to work against business.

“I do think that the EU, its rules and regulations, but also the way Tony Blair fundamentally changed the way the country is run by taking enormous powers away from elected ministers and politicians and handing it over to quangos and regulators, has made the life of small businesses much, much harder. So there is much to do in this country.”

Checkatrade founder Kevin Byrne said “roll on the next general election”.

He told the press conference: “I believe if we back the doers, the makers, the fixers, we will rebuild the pride in the UK.

“We will rebuild the family in the UK, we will rebuild the community in the UK, but most of all we’ll rebuild the hope that we all need.

“Here’s one simple truth that I’ll finish on. When Britain’s small businesses thrive, Britain will thrive as well.”

Speaking at a central London press conference after the Reform leader, Checkatrade founder Kevin Byrne said: “Right now, I just don’t feel or see or sense there’s a vision for this country outside of Reform.

“I was asked before I come on the stage, ‘Kev, why have you come over to Reform?’

“And I said, it’s desperation and disappointment.”

Nigel Farage announced Checkatrade founder Kevin Byrne to lead Reform UK’s small business drive.

Nigel Farage said: “My message today is very, very simple. The Conservatives betrayed you on small business, Labour doesn’t have any comprehension actually of what you do as small business.

“We do, we get it. I’ve been in business, I’ve run my own businesses as many of my colleagues have, as thousands of my members have.

“So today as we launch Small Business for Reform, we are looking for tens of thousands of businesses up and down this country to join this organisation.

“We will put in place a board, we will work together to produce the right policies for small business, for entrepreneurship, for start ups.

“More than that, we will become a very strong voice and a very strong lobby for small business as an ongoing part of the national debate in this country and it’s a debate frankly that has not been heard for far too long.

“I feel passionately about this, I will certainly be heavily involved, this is in my blood, I know it’s in yours too.”

He added: “Let’s give this, the single most ignored group of people in this country, 5.6 million businesses, 13 million staff, 50% of jobs in the private sector, it’s about time they had a voice and we intend to give them that.”

Nigel Farage raised fears over Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s Budget later this month.

He said: “Well of course everything about his Budget will be to attack hard work, attack saving, attack aspiration.”

Nigel Farage told the press conference: “Some on the Left will tell you the economy is failing because capitalism is failing.

No, we’re not living in capitalism, we’re living in an age of global corporatism. “We’re living in an age where the big businesses virtually control and own the political arena.

“Capitalism is what these people do, free enterprise is what these people do, these people take risks.

“They risk their own money, they go to the bank and borrow money. They’ve no idea at the start whether their business concept will work or not and many of them will have failures along the way.

“But that’s what free market enterprise is about. It’s about risk, it’s about reward, it’s about failure.

“Some of them who, despite everything, go on, succeed, make lots of money, well they’re almost treated in Britain as if they’re treated something wrong, as if morally it’s wrong to be successful, morally wrong to make money.

“Well, what a Reform is going to do is everything we can do from the education system onwards to change that culture.

“We will champion hard work, we will champion success, we will look to advertise men and women who we see as British heroes because they’ve set things up and succeeded. ”

Nigel Farage pledged that Reform UK would axe IR35 rules.

He said: “The IR35 rules have made life very, very difficult for self-employed contractors and frankly they simply need to be scrapped and let’s allow the self-employed, who don’t get sick pay or anything else, to carry on with their lives.”

The Reform UK leader told the press conference: “This Labour Government has absolutely no comprehension of what it’s like to set up a small business, to run a small business, to meet a monthly payroll, none of them have ever done it, none of them get it.

“And as for the Conservative Party which over the years would have said that it did stand for small business, well, in their time in office, all they did was punish small business again and again.

“And unlike the other party leaders I set up my first small business in 1993. For 30 years I’ve run small businesses, for 30 years I’ve known what the ups and downs of running a small business are like.”

Nigel Farage has taken to the stage for the Reform UK press conference.

There are 300 small business owners in the audience at the event in London.

Ross Kempsell, a former aide to Boris Johnson when Johnson was Prime Minister and now a Conservative member of the House of Lords, said: “Labour claimed Starmer had an amazing relationship with the US, parading him in the Oval Office to drooling travelling lobby.

“Promptly the Ambassador resigned and now thanks to the BBC the admin believe Brits in DC are genuinely a foreign interference issue and must be deported.”

President Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt said: “The White House proudly called out their purposeful fake news, and this resignation is an admission of guilt.

“Everyone should watch GB News.”

The chairwoman of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee has said she is “very sad” about director-general Tim Davie’s resignation.

Dame Caroline Dinenage told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I’m very sad about Tim Davie stepping down. I think he was an effective leader at the BBC. I think he was a great champion for public service media, but there is no escaping the fact that he was very slow to act on this particular issue. But this isn’t the first time and on this particular issue, Michael Prescott’s report, he just didn’t take it seriously until it was too late.

“He should have reacted with concern and examined the claims, but just ignored it.

“But you know, I do feel it was entirely avoidable and it’s really regretful given the huge commitment to the BBC and public service that Tim Davie demonstrated.”

She added that she thinks it seems “a little bit odd” that her committee has not yet heard from the BBC’s chairman, Samir Shah.

Nigel Farage said US President Donald Trump was “enraged” over the BBC Panorama programme.

The Reform UK leader told LBC: “He was absolutely enraged. Enraged that the BBC had done this to him. He could scarcely believe it.

“I mean, he has been a critic of the BBC in the past, that is true, but he really thought this was the final straw.

“And frankly, you know everyone talks about Russia meddling in elections. We hear that year after year after year. Well, what about the BBC, their attempt to interfere in a Presidential election just weeks before the vote?”

The BBC’s board has not properly defended the corporation, a former Downing Street communications chief has suggested.

Sir Craig Oliver, who is also a former BBC news executive, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the problems at the corporation “matter”, adding “the BBC is an enormous institution with a huge impact on British life”.

“What I think has gone wrong here, I think is really an issue of the governance of the institution,” Sir Craig said.

“We’re living in a fast-moving digital world where there are a lot of people who want to attack the BBC, and what we’ve seen is really a vacuum that has been created.

“It’s been obvious for days now that the BBC needed to step up, explain, apologise, move on.

“And what we’ve seen is the governance of the BBC saying, ‘we’ll get back to you on Monday – we’ll leave that for days. We’ll allow the President of the United States to be attacking the institution, and we’re not going to properly defend it’.”

The resignations of the BBC’s director-general and its head of news was “a coup”, a former newspaper editor has said.

David Yelland, who edited The Sun from 1998 to 2003, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the departure of director-general Tim Davie and Deborah Turness, the chief executive of BBC News, was “an inside job”.

He said: “It was a coup, and worse than that, it was an inside job.

“There were people inside the BBC, very close to the board, very close to the, on the board, who have systematically undermined Tim Davie and his senior team over a period of time and this has been going on for a long time. What happened yesterday didn’t just happen in isolation.”

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch wrote on X: “It’s right that Tim Davie and Deborah Turness have finally taken responsibility and resigned from the BBC. But let’s be honest, this has been a catalogue of serious failures that runs far deeper.

“The Prescott report exposed institutional bias that cannot be swept away with two resignations – strong action must be taken on all the issues it raised. The culture at the BBC has not yet changed.

“BBC Arabic must be brought under urgent control. The BBC’s US and Middle East coverage needs a full overhaul. And on basic matters of biology, the corporation can no longer allow its output to be shaped by a cabal of ideological activists.

“The new leadership must now deliver genuine reform of the culture of the BBC, top to bottom – because it should not expect the public to keep funding it through a compulsory licence fee unless it can finally demonstrate true impartiality.”

The BBC should “take impartiality seriously”, a former newspaper editor has said.

Lord Charles Moore told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “First thing you have to do is admit you’re wrong instead of trying to defend yourself in this ridiculous way.

“All the BBC bias goes in one direction… the memo goes, it could go much, much further, but it’s about trans issues, identity, race, Trump, Israel, Gaza… it’s always from a sort of metropolitan, left position absolutely consistently. That’s how the bias is.

“So that means that it’s not serving a very large percentage of the licence fee-payers.

“I’m not, of course, saying that it should be right-wing either. I’m saying it should take impartiality seriously and put in people capable of running this gigantic and self-satisfied bureaucracy.”

Government minister Louise Sandher-Jones rejected suggestions the BBC was institutionally biased.

The veterans minister told Sky News: “When you look at the huge range of domestic issues, local issues, international issues, that it has to cover, I think its output is very trusted.

“When I speak to people who’ve got very strongly held views on those, they’re still using the BBC for a lot of their information, it’s forming their views on this.

“I think we can all point to elements of BBC broadcasting of news and say ‘well, that reflects my views, and that doesn’t’ and that’s absolutely right, that we should be able to say that.”

BBC chairman Samir Shah is expected to apologise for the way a speech by Donald Trump was edited for Panorama after several days of pressure on the broadcaster prompted director-general Tim Davie to quit.

The chief executive of BBC News, Deborah Turness, also announced her resignation on Sunday after the corporation was accused of misleading the public following claims that the speech had been selectively edited in the documentary.

A memo by Michael Prescott, a former external adviser to the BBC’s editorial standards committee, raised concerns in the summer about the way clips of the US president’s speech on January 6 2021 were spliced together in Trump: A Second Chance? to make it appear he had told supporters he was going to walk to the US Capitol with them to “fight like hell”.

Critics said the documentary, broadcast by the BBC the week before last year’s US election, was misleading and removed a section where the US president said he wanted supporters to demonstrate peacefully.

Mr Shah is expected to apologise and provide further details on the Panorama episode on Monday in his response to the Culture Media and Sport Committee which asked how he would address the concerns.