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In a valedictory podcast appearance, Tim Davie, whose resignation as the BBC director general takes final effect on 2 April, thanked his neighbours for smuggling him out through their gardens when the media were camped outside his house during various BBC scandals.

Following today’s sudden announcement that the Radio 2 breakfast show presenter Scott Mills has been summarily sacked over a so-far unspecified failure of “personal conduct”, Davie may be relieved that he only has three more days of running with his head ducked past next door’s rhododendrons.

It seems unlikely, though, that Davie would have taken this dramatic decision without consulting Rhodri Talfan Davies, who takes over as the interim DG from Friday until 18 May, when the former Google boss Matt Brittin assumes the job permanently (or as much as that word can apply, in a media job that has frequently been an ejector seat).

The aim of announcing Mills’s departure this week may be to isolate it as the last furore of the Davie regime and leave his successors a clean copybook to blot. Certainly, the decision seems to have been taken with shocking speed.

At 9.30am last Tuesday, Mills told his Radio 2 listeners (6.5 million weekly, according to quarterly ratings released last month) that he would be back at 6.30am on Wednesday to resume the three-hour breakfast show he has hosted since January 2025.

When the Radio 2 super sub Gary Davies depped for the rest of the week, the audience may have assumed flu. Very unusually when presenters are under investigation, as we must assume Mills to have been since at least last Tuesday afternoon – there is no evidence or prior gossip inside or outside the BBC, making the sudden departure and “sacking” truly shocking.

BBC departures in this manner are startlingly rare. While Jeremy Clarkson (for hitting a colleague who brought him an unsatisfactory supper) and Gary Lineker (for reposting an image with antisemitic connotations) were effectively sacked from Match of the Day and Top Gear, the press releases used more sanitised language.

After allegations severe enough to be career-ending, broadcasters have usually been suspended under investigation, as with BBC Wales’s Wynne Evans and BBC Scotland’s Kaye Adams, whose contracts were cancelled recently over claims of misconduct that they dispute.

While there is already much lurid speculation about what might have happened with Mills, the most serious forms of misbehaviour would paradoxically be less likely to have a rapid resolution. A recent example came when the former News at Ten presenter Huw Edwards was (we now know) lengthily off-air under internal BBC and external police investigations over separate allegations of grooming a young man and receiving indecent images of underage children. Edwards resigned from the BBC and later pleaded guilty at the magistrates court for the latter, receiving a six-month sentence suspended for two years.

As an employer must usually give an employee under judicial suspicion the chance to clear their name while suspended on pay, the Mills case feels very different. Without knowing yet what caused his precipitate fall, it appears that the BBC legal department has taken a very rapid view (unless new information contradicted the resolution of an earlier matter) that there was evidence for immediate termination of Mills’s contract – worth about £355,000, making him the 11th best-recompensed BBC on-air talent (although those figures included only his earliest editions on Radio 2 breakfast, and the latest pay disclosures this July are likely to place Mills in the BBC half-millionaire club for the last financial year).

Ripping up a deal like this is normally for what is legally called “cause”, a term covering prima facie breaking of contractual employment conditions or causing indisputable damage to corporate reputation. Dismissals for cause usually calculate that there is no plausible chance of appeal, exoneration or compensation, nor of public or media pushback if the circumstances become clear.

Whatever the reason, it is a sudden and devastating career reverse. While BBC presenters outside the news division are usually on short-term contracts of one to three years in length, Mills – who turned 53 on Saturday, which is unlikely to have been a happy day for him – had seemed set to become a freelance “lifer” at the corporation.

Starting on Radio 1 breakfasts (1998-2004), he graduated to afternoons on the pop station then matured to Radio 2 early afternoon and early evening slots before the morning berth that completes, at least for the moment, his BBC CV. Mills was also engaging and eye-catching enough to have a parallel TV career, presenting Top of the Pops and the national lottery draw and competing in the reality shows Strictly Come Dancing, Robot Wars and Celebrity Race Across the World, which he won last year with his husband, Sam.

Another decision – and this is likely to be one for Rhodri Talfan Davies and Brittin, rather than Davie’s final 48 hours – is whether whatever has taken place necessitates the removal of Mills’s work from iPlayer, as has happened to the corporation’s most scandalous talent. If so, that would be a particular blow to the Race Across the World franchise, with Mills due to present a spin-off visualised podcast alongside the new non-celebrity series starting on Thursday.

Veteran BBC observers may have one nervous concern. Historically, the corporation has sometimes responded to allegations of under-reacting to a previous scandal by overreacting to the next. (Tony Blackburn was sacked overnight for allegedly giving misleading evidence to the inquiry into the BBC and Jimmy Savile, but reinstated after legal action.) So, having been accused of slowness to react over Edwards and in admitting Panorama’s misleading editing of a Donald Trump speech, it’s just possible that the BBC will turn out to have been too hasty this time.

Mills is unlikely to sue for $10bn – as the US president has done – but he could still afford decent lawyers, so the most striking aspect of the broadcaster’s departure is the apparent rapidity and finality of the judgment and the certainty that it is unchallengeable.

If this turns out to be wrong, Brittin had better start calculating the route through his neighbours’ flower beds.