Charles Moore may be out of the picture, but the intensified attacks against the corporation are real, and its chief enemy is the government. It’s time to explode the myths
So Charles Moore isn’t going to be chairman of the
BBC after all. Perhaps he withdrew because he was upset by Julian Knight MP, Conservative chair of the digital, culture, media and sport select committee, saying that appointing him would be like a convicted fraudster running a bank. Perhaps it was the money: one story goes that he had negotiated for nearly three times what the current chairman Sir David Clementi is paid. Will we ever know? That’s not to say there’s no other speculation. Kelvin MacKenzie, former editor of the Sun, is apparently applying and, if appointed, he says the first thing he’d do would be to sack Emily Maitlis.
There was even talk of appointing George Osborne as chairman, the man who has done more harm to the BBC than anyone, before he ruled himself out. And there remains the possibility of Paul Dacre using his forthright turns of phrase at the morning briefings of regulator Ofcom, with its higher ranks of economists and former Whitehall mandarins. I can’t quite see it. Yet even if none of the most notorious BBC-haters ends up in either chair, the act of trailing their names before the start of the appointment process may well have deterred some candidates from applying.