Staff feel disillusioned with senior management and bitter that his pay had become an unstoppable snowball

For Huw Edwards, once the most trusted newsreader in Britain, now a convicted user of images of the most serious child sexual abuse, the disgrace is total – and nowhere more than in his home country of Wales.

Hours after he pleaded guilty to making indecent images of children as young as seven, a plaque on a building at Cardiff castle commemorating its unveiling by Edwards had already been wrenched off; his voice was also deleted from its guide. He is likely to be stripped of honorary titles at Bangor and Cardiff universities. A mural of the newsreader’s face in his home village of Llangennech, Carmarthenshire has already been painted over by the artist.