Sir David Normington, the lofty mandarin now retiring from his task of supervising truly independent appointments to government jobs, warns in the FT of “a return to the days of political and personal patronage” (or jobs for the boys). He’s talking about the seeping drift of present practice and the still bigger opportunity for slippage in a report by Sir Gerry Grimstone that allows ministers a wider choice of approved but not independently blessed candidates – a whole basket of opportunities to get the men or women you want in place, even if they’re below what Normington calls “the level of appointability”.
What? This must be a conspiracy to saddle the new BBC executive board with a majority of Tories, edging the Whittingdale Broadcasting Corporation a step closer. Grimstone and Sir David Clementi, author of a report on BBC governance, are standard City bigwigs following standard City practice. And don’t ask who appointed them…
Except that conspiracies aren’t quite the same as messy manoeuvrings and musclings-in. The government – which means D Cameron more than J Whittingdale – needs cutting off at the pass here. The BBC will die if its boardrooms are stuffed with his compliant “jobsworth boys”. But there surely isn’t some sinister plot of the sort currently alleged by Hacked Off, of all groups, against newspapers that didn’t swing into headline action months ago over a brief, defunct liaison between Whittingdale and a dominatrix called Olivia King.
Shades of Max Mosley and the dear, dead News of the World, you might ask? Not exactly. Here the plot involves the culture secretary supposedly blocking Leveson implementation because the attack dogs of Fleet Street threaten him with exposure. It looks like tosh – because broken by an ex-political reporter for the Independent, which is no sort of rottweiler and isn’t part of the tabloid circle in any case. It feels like tosh because the tale itself – as nailed by disappointed reporters – was always bound to leak, as it has. And the toshfulness is complete when you note that Cameron runs this policy show anyway, and that Whittingdale’s own, matching views were clear long before he came near to ministerial office. But hey, why let simple, practical tosh drag an outlandish yarn below what we may call “the level of credibility”?
