It’s the headline of which Daily Mail dreams are made: BBC Trust man admits no one has heard of the BBC Trust. Well, it wasn’t entirely like that, but almost; outgoing BBC trustee David Liddiment telling MPs on Tuesday: “I wouldn’t have thought licence fee payers, not that many licence fee payers, know what the BBC Trust is. It doesn’t mean to say we don’t represent their interests.” Asked by MPs, as part of their inquiry into the future of the BBC, why not, Liddiment said the trust was still relatively new. “We are eight years’ old. It takes time to get into the public consciousness.” Tory MP Philip Davies, possibly missing his old spats with BBC Trust chair Rona Fairhead’s predecessor, Lord Patten, sniffed a scrap. “Mr Liddiment,” he began. “Your extraordinary statement that nobody really knows about the BBC Trust, and the reason you gave is that it is has only been in existence for eight years … how long did you expect it to be in existence before people did realise it existed?” The use of the past tense for the under-fire BBC regulator/champion was especially hurtful. Liddiment, who won’t be on the trust much longer, at least managed a (brief) smile. “The point I was trying to make was the phrase, BBC Trust, is not necessarily uppermost in the audience’s mind,” he reasoned, with a Zen-like calm that Patten might not have mustered. “They know the BBC. What matters is the licence fee payer cares deeply about the BBC.” Davies will just have to trust him on that.
