BBC’s Have I Got News for You error shows why fact checking matters

Over the weekend, an episode of Have I Got News for You was temporarily removed from BBC iPlayer after presenter Victoria Coren Mitchell made a factual error.

Speaking about the government’s proposed digital ID scheme, Coren Mitchell asked the teams who would benefit from the introduction of the cards. She went on to claim: “I was thinking of the company Multiverse, who has been chosen to run the digital ID cards scheme.”

As we explained in our fact check, published before the episode aired, this isn’t true—according to both the government and Multiverse. In any case, Multiverse, which Euan Blair (son of former Prime Minister Sir Tony Blair) founded in 2016, is an “upskilling company”, not a software developer.

The episode has now been reuploaded to BBC iPlayer with the inaccurate segment removed. A BBC spokesperson confirmed the edit in advance to several news outlets and apologised for the “unintentional editorial oversight”.

Coren Mitchell later clarified on X:

Full Fact will always advocate for correcting errors; owning mistakes and addressing them transparently helps rebuild trust in the media ecosystem. But this error also underlines why organisations like ours need to be adequately supported. Episodes like this show how easily misinformation can spread and why fact checking is vital for public understanding. Had this claim gone unchallenged, it risked misleading audiences—exactly the kind of situation Full Fact exists to prevent.