The BBC Trust chairman, Lord Patten, and the director general, Mark Thompson, were being tight-lipped at Tuesday's BBC annual report press briefing about Rupert Murdoch's decision to prompt his BSkyB bid to be referred to the Competition Commission by withdrawing a plan to spin-off Sky News. After the BBC's annual report Thompson would only say: "I don't have anything to say but I thought personally at the time that it should be forwarded to the competition authorities and it has been." Patten added: "It's a matter of public policy, not for me. I admire the Sky News channel and Sky Arts but I've no publishable opinion on the ownership of Sky." Sadly for Monkey, he declined to reveal his unpublishable opinion too.
