Lord Lester of Herne Hill is a great and good liberal lawyer – and, though nearing 80, seemingly indefatigable. So he’s busy this spring meeting BBC supporters as he drafts a private member’s bill underpinning corporation independence (by enshrining future royal charters in statute). And meanwhile the 38 Degrees petition denouncing Mr Secretary Whittingdale’s plans to appoint 11 of the 14 members of a new, unitary BBC board has topped 500,000 signatories.
So let’s be clear. The Whittingdale Broadcasting Corporation, in its emerging version, is in no way loved or respected. Only George Osborne, nicking a bit more licence-fee cash to bolster that “long-term plan” of his, could possibly embrace its misty ways or murky means. But there are still a couple of hurdles to clear as the fight goes on.
One is Lester’s insistence that “the members of the new BBC board… should be independent members [and] not become political placemen and placewomen. Therefore there should be a proper process by which they are appointed.”
Which, alas, is a propriety much easier insisted on than achieved. Anyone who’s ever been asked to advise on some public appointment or other (like me) knows that there’s as often or not been a discreet suggestion that Mr X or Ms Y put their name forward – in short, that you’re dealing from a stacked deck.
How did Sir David Clementi become adviser to Mr Whittingdale on these issues? How did Sir Brian Leveson become supreme judicial regulator of press regulation? We don’t quite know. We probably never will. Lester is right on the button when he says: “Everybody agrees in principle in protecting the BBC’s independence, but no one has said how that is to be done.”
And the new BBC board, of course, is merely half of the story. Under the Clementi plan it will be responding to an operational framework laid down by a new sub-board of Ofcom. Who will appoint this new secondary authority? Who will chair it? The risk, under Clementi rules, is that one HMG sanctified body will set and mark the homework completed to order by another government-selected board. Statute only gets you so far in a BBC world of sticky fingers.
