Kelvin MacKenzie is never shy of using his Sun column to settle a few private scores. Today he takes on that old nemesis Ofcom, introducing readers - who presumably were hitherto uninterested in the upper echelons of media wonkery - to the antics of the watchdog's chief executive, Ed Richards, and his cronies. "I have often pondered how Ed Richards in a few short years has gone from a shoe polisher at No 10 to Brown and Blair to running the media regulator Ofcom, earning £400,000 a year," MacKenzie begins. "He's never done anything in the media before, except as an assistant TV producer (neither onerous nor creative) so I presume his brown-nosing skills were what caught the eye." MacKenzie – who as the former boss of TalkSport is enraged about plans for analogue radio switchoff – is agog with excitement that David Cameron may kill off Ofcom. "It will be fantastic to see what happens to Richards," he drools. "My suspicion is he would be lucky to earn £40,000 in the real world. Under him, Ofcom has turned into an absolute joke, with employees appearing to have their bum in the butter." MacKenzie tears into "elderly has-been" Colette Bowe and "hapless" Philip Graf, Ofcom's chairman and deputy chairman, for their high salaries and being the "idiots" behind radio switchoff and "other crackpot schemes". And his tirade is rounded off with another choice barb. "Ofcom won't like this article. Perhaps they'll get one of their eight PRs to email me about it."
