John Pienaar to leave BBC after 28 years

Veteran political broadcaster to take role at new Times Radio

John Pienaar is to quit the BBC after 28 years, the veteran political broadcaster has announced.

He tweeted: “Personal news: after nearly three decades at the BBC I am leaving to join the soon-to-be-launched Times Radio as Drive Time presenter.”

Mr Pienaar started on the BBC politics beat in 1992 and is currently its deputy political editor.

He presents Pienaar’s Politics on Radio 5 Live and, according to the broadcaster, “has worked on the full range of BBC news and current affairs programmes”.

Mr Pienaar is also a former political correspondent at The Independent and the Press Association news agency. He began his journalistic career on the South London Press.

When he was appointed to his current role in 2016, his boss Jonathan Munro described Mr Pienaar as “a political animal to his fingertips, a great storyteller and supreme broadcaster”.

The high-profile departure comes amid a row over the future of the BBC, with Boris Johnson’s government promising a review of how it is funded.

On Monday morning Conservative MPs lashed out at the PM over reports the licence fee might be scrapped altogether and the BBC forced to move to a Netflix-style subscription model.

Damian Green said such a course would amount to “cultural vandalism” while Huw Merriman, who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on the BBC, said the corporation should “not be a target”.

Ministers are consulting on whether non-payment of the licence fee should be decriminalised.​

Times Radio, a new brand for Rupert Murdoch’s News UK, is set to launch later this year and will broadcast across the UK on digital radio and online.

It will combine the journalism of The Times and The Sunday Times with the broadcasting nous of Wireless, the company behind talkRADIO which News UK bought in 2016.