The Guardian view on the BBC Trust’s new chair Rona Fairhead: challenging times

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/31/guardian-view-bbc-trust-rona-fairhead

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At last, the government has found someone willing to take on the job of chairing the BBC Trust. So thankless is the task of defending the corporation before MPs at Westminster and in the teeth of media hostility, so dysfunctional its governance and so complex the choices ahead of it in the campaign for charter renewal, that it has taken five months for Rona Fairhead to emerge as the preferred successor to Lord Patten. She will have to work hard to undo the damage done by the obscure nature of the search and appointment processes and the trail of political meddling that accompanied it. She will also have to work fast to catch up with the case for charter renewal, which must be completed by the end of 2016. She has the BBC’s future in her hands.

At least Ms Fairhead’s connections with the Tory party appear more tenuous than those of some of the names that have appeared in the frame since Lord Patten’s enforced resignation after a health scare in May. She is not a Tory intimate like Lord Coe, for whom the terms of the job were redesigned, only for him to withdraw anyway. Nor does she have crony status, a charge levelled at Nick Prettejohn, who had been a special adviser to the chancellor, George Osborne. All the same, once again it may be a case of who rather than what you know. Ms Fairhead’s husband was a Conservative councillor and she is said to be a chum of both Mr Osborne and the cabinet secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, who, incidentally, chaired the recruitment panel. She is a non-executive member of the Cabinet Office board, and the Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has made her a business ambassador. Weekend briefings suggest she had promised to look afresh at the big challenges facing the BBC.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. Few would argue about the need to revisit the BBC governance structure after the catastrophes of Savile, the George Entwistle resignation and dismaying decisions on executive pay and payoffs. On the plus side, Ms Fairhead brings experience in both management consultancy and a large and diverse media business, although she will have to live down her own controversial million-pound payout after she left the FT last year. But governance questions will seem plain sailing compared with sustaining the BBC’s finances in a way that protects its unique standing in global broadcasting. The trust’s public position so far is blandly complacent. That means the strategy is hers to make. Until she appears next week before MPs on the media committee, not even her guiding principles are known. She will face an environment that will often be aggressively hostile. For her it will be a novel, and almost certainly a disagreeable, experience. Congratulations, Ms Fairhead. And good luck.