BBC chair: appoint on merit

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/07/bbc-chair-lord-patten-appoint-merit-editorial

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He was the Tory wet who survived Margaret Thatcher, the minister who came through implementing the poll tax, and the Brit who did the brokering with Beijing before the union jack came down over Hong Kong. But now Chris Patten is bowing out early as chair of the BBC Trust, after undergoing major heart surgery, which may not relate to the one job which he concedes was "10 times harder than I had expected". Even if there is no connection, this is a singularly punishing role.

Lord Patten's tenure was dominated by the twin crises of Jimmy Savile and Alistair McAlpine, which caused a director general to resign after 54 days and certainly felt like it shook the corporation to its foundations. Yet the next man or woman in the seat will have to grapple with questions of funding, governance and technology, which will prove more fateful still. The BBC will feel vulnerable on all three fronts unless and until the right person is securely in place, and history does not portend well to their being chosen with care.

Churchill hand-picked Sir Alexander Cadogan, who had never watched British television, as the BBC chairman, brushing off his concerns about not being qualified for the post with the insistence "there are no qualifications". Although it would be unimaginable for David Cameron or any recent predecessor to be so brazen about it, the same disregard for experience in the sector and the same penchant for highly personal picks has cascaded down the years, often with unhappy consequences. Sometimes the appointers' motives have been partisan, as when the Thatcher-friendly Marmaduke Hussey cleared the way for the ejection of DG Alasdair Milne, who was not considered "one of us". Just as often, the overriding consideration has been the animosity that ministers of all stripes feel towards a BBC that gets too independent.

A typical bit of Wilsonian intrigue in the 1960s made it seem cunning to bring in Charles Hill, then regarded as a reliable BBC-baiter, a disruptive move which David Attenborough likened to putting Rommel in charge of the Eighth Army. Around the time of the Hutton report, Alastair Campbell and Tony Blair pursued the corporation with such vigour that a chair and a DG with Labour connections both had to go, and governance was restructured to recast the relationship between the two, enforcing a separation between management and the new superintending trust, which became the chairman's domain.

The new culture secretary, Sajid Javid, who is tasked with drawing up a shortlist of two names for his boss to pick between, will need to be made of stuff that's too rare in politics if he is to resist the temptation to exploit this potential moment of leverage. But resist it he should. An ideological aversion to the whole structure of the BBC prevails in parts, though by no means all, of the Conservative party, and parliament's recent vote to hand ministers powers to decriminalise non-payment of the TV licence is a reminder that the future security of the funding base can never be assumed. The corporation's rivals include every other media outfit in the UK, and if the more imperious demands that the Murdoch empire made against it briefly seemed easier to brush off after the latter's humbling over phone hacking, the BBC's detractors elsewhere never let up – thus it is, as a wearied Lord Patten explains, that "the latest script for Sherlock" can come to be seen as "a political conspiracy". But more fundamental than any of this is the unremitting march of technology, which is allowing people to watch content on all sorts of devices that do not require a TV licence.

The new chair will need to grapple with all this through the looming licence fee haggle, and the once-a-decade royal charter review. Even the best political pick would struggle, and – after the soothing tenure of Michael Grade a few years ago – here is another moment for someone who knows media from the inside. There are many suitable candidates – just so long as Mr Javid is prepared to do the right thing, and appoint on merit.