When Chris Moyles announced he was leaving his breakfast show at the BBC in 2012 there was one phrase he kept repeating.

‘We have had the best time ever.’

But who did he mean by ‘we’? Having hailed himself as the ‘Saviour of the Radio 1’, he no doubt imagined he was speaking for a vast team of producers, runners, researchers and execs at the station and the wider Beeb.

But that was a matter of opinion because in reality, I am told, by the end of his eight years at the helm the only people still thinking they were having a good time were Moyles himself and a small circle around him who worked overtime to keep a lid on his ‘tw**ish’ and ‘entitled’ behaviour.

‘It was like he got a kick out of making people uncomfortable,’ a former BBC employee told me last night.

While his critics are certainly not making the kind of allegations levelled at his ex-colleague Scott Mills – which have led to Mills being sacked from his plum job as the Radio 2 Breakfast show host – questions are arising as to why the BBC allowed Moyles to spend years behaving in a ‘laddish’ and ‘nasty’ manner.

Some will recall, for example, his endless on-air attacks on the Girls Aloud singer, Nicola Roberts. For six years he called her vile names such as ‘horsey chops’ and a ‘sour-faced old cow’.

Nicola was only in her early twenties at the time and later revealed Moyles’s public bullying significantly affected her confidence, saying she struggled to look in the mirror and adding: ‘For years I felt like the ugly one in Girls Aloud.’

However, today I can reveal that behind the scenes, Moyles, now 52, was despised by many of those who worked underneath him.

A former BBC employee tells me: ‘He constantly made people feel stupid or embarrassed. It was relentless: he was loathed in the office because it was all so mean and unnecessary. It made for a bad atmosphere. And, no, it wasn’t “lad banter”, which was the usual party line. We can all take that to a certain extent. He was difficult and wouldn’t cooperate if it didn’t suit him.’

My source added: ‘But if Chris liked you, he could be charming and those he did like were completely taken in by him. They wouldn’t hear a bad word, so a “circle of loyalty” normalised his behaviour.’

Increasingly, Moyles’s former colleagues are starting to speak out publicly.

Last month, Radio 1 star Greg James told of his treatment by Moyles when he joined the station as an eager young presenter in 2007, aged 21.

In his memoir, All The Best For The Future, James, now 40, revealed his surprise at being called ‘the posh student’ – apparently based on his love of cricket – by Moyles, who was supposed to be a mentor.

Moyles quickly took against James – who is now the host of the Radio 1 Breakfast show.

Hertfordshire-born James, whose parents are both teachers, said: ‘Imagine my surprise when I turned up at Radio 1 and was thrust into the incredible daytime line-up to do the Early Breakfast show before Chris Moyles every day, only for him to start calling me “the posh student”.

‘I really wasn’t expecting that. I don’t help myself with the cricket thing, but it felt reductive to be called that.

‘Moyles didn’t know anything about me. He had no idea what my upbringing was like.

‘He saw what he thought was a nice, excited, slightly boring 21-year-old from the Home Counties with fantastic flowing indie hair who he could wind up a bit because I was new and just very happy to be there.’

Eventually, in 2012, Moyles was called into a meeting by Radio 1's new controller, Ben Cooper, who told him he had been sacked from the Breakfast show to be replaced by Nick Grimshaw, 11 years his junior.

‘I was a bit miffed that the story that went out was that I was too old and I had got fired,’ reflected Moyles on Ross Kemp’s podcast in 2020.

‘I thought they handled it really badly. Then when [Grimshaw’s] show failed and the listening figures fell, I was like, “Not that f-ing easy, is it boys?”’

At the time of the sacking, Cooper promised a new role for the ‘furious’ presenter, but instead Moyles left the BBC and took a three-year break from radio.

In 2015, he started working as Breakfast show host for Radio X, bringing over his former Radio 1 producer, Pippa Taylor and newsreader, Dominic Byrne. Moyles continues to present on Radio X even though questions about his behaviour at Radio 1 continue to mount.

Recently, I wrote about a resurfaced clip from 2002 in which Moyles, who was 27 at the time, offered to take the virginity of then-underage star Charlotte Church when she turned 16. I received a phone call that left me stunned.

It was from a PR associate of Moyles, who defended the historic clip and admitted that while inappropriate, his comments were simply a symptom of noughties ‘lad culture’.

I disagree – and so, it seems, does Church herself. Five years after Moyles had creepily asked to take her virginity, the Welsh star brought him on her Channel 4 programme, The Charlotte Church Show, and asked him to ‘explain your behaviour’.

Moyles said: ‘Well, you were under 16, yeah, 15. But you were gonna be 16, and I offered to take your virginity.’

The crowd began to laugh and Charlotte probed: ‘What exactly did you say?’

Moyles had said he wanted to ‘lead [the singer] through the forest of sexuality now that she had reached 16’, a revolting line he defended as a ‘sweet’ proposal.

When I told my BBC source about the bizarre phone call from the PR trying to defend this behaviour, they said: ‘That doesn’t surprise me. It was always put down to “lad culture”, “lad banter”, but that wasn’t it. He was an entitled t*** who made inappropriate comments like that.’

Indeed, his 2006 memoir, The Gospel According to Chris Moyles, is full of evidence of his being difficult to work with.

‘A lot of people think I’m a bastard to deal with, I’m not,’ insisted Moyles. ‘I’m the bad guy on air. Moyles is the bully. Moyles is the ego. I am a nice person. I’m just a bit of a git on the radio. It’s what I do.’

Elsewhere, he urged those working with him: ‘Be able to “handle” me, not be intimidated by me.’

Elsewhere, he makes repeated vulgar references to women, including even his own agent, Vivienne Clore, of whom he wrote: ‘She does have large breasts and is actually quite sweet.’

But some of his comments, although they might have been dressed up as jokes, caused upset among his co-presenters.

In 2018, Tina Daheley, who was a sports reader on the Breakfast show from 2010 to 2012, spoke out about working with the DJ.

On air, the presenter, who is of Indian heritage, was picked on for how she looked and became a running joke as a potential date for visiting pop stars.

She said: ‘There was an assumption based on the music I liked, so Chris would try to set me up with Tinie Tempah or another black guest.

‘Put it this way, when we did our final [Moyles Breakfast show] and could invite friends and family, I wouldn’t have dreamed of inviting my 6ft 5in dad in a turban there.'

It was Prince William, the 45-year-old explained, who made her realise the mistreatment she had endured.

Daheley said: ‘The first thing he said to me was that he was such a fan and that he’d been listening to me for years. The second was: “I’m really pleased that some presenters now aren’t as mean to you now as other presenters.”’

Perhaps most tellingly, she went on to credit Grimshaw, who succeeded Moyles as frontman – not ‘producers, editors or managers’ – for ‘normalising’ Radio 1, doing away with hierarchy and ‘a culture where the star is untouchable’.

No matter how historic they may be, it seems Moyles’s previous misdemeanours will not remain ‘a problem of their time’ and are very much becoming part of his present.