Former Newsnight journalist says editors instead told him to ‘be careful’ when he was attacked by ex-No 10 aide on BBC board

• ‘Nobody can be entirely impartial’: Lewis Goodall on poverty, politics and the BBC

Lewis Goodall, the former policy editor of Newsnight and now a presenter on the hit podcast The News Agents, has alleged that his BBC bosses failed to “push back enough” when his reporting was criticised by a former Conservative communications chief, Robbie Gibb.

“It was McCarthyite,” he says, suggesting in a candid new interview in the Observer Magazine that he was briefly the target of a Tory witch-hunt – an uncomfortable period which intensified when Gibb joined the board of the BBC. “People high up at the BBC didn’t seem to be pushing back enough.”