The BBC has denied reports Jeremy Paxman is to leave Newsnight after the BBC's flagship current affairs show mistakenly implicated a senior Tory in a child abuse scandal.
The Sunday Mirror had reported Paxman, who famously asked Tory Michael Howard the same question 12 times, was disillusioned and would not return from filming a documentary to anchor the show.
A source told the paper: “The consensus is that he won’t be coming back. He has had an illustrious career but he has publicly distanced himself from the current regime.”
But speaking to The Huffington Post UK on Sunday evening, a BBC spokesperson said: "The Mirror piece is not correct and we're expecting him back on Wednesday."
Last week, after George Entwistle stepped down as the BBC's director general in the wake of Newsnight's report, Paxman released a statement saying: “George Entwistle’s departure is a great shame. He has been brought low by cowards and incompetents.
"The real problem here is the BBC’s decision, in the wake of the Hutton Inquiry, to play safe by appointing biddable people.
"They then compounded the problem by enforcing a series of cuts on programme budgets, while bloating the management
That is how you arrive at the current mess on Newsnight. I very much doubt the problem is unique to that programme."