So now we know the identity of the 12 people who will act as trustees - remember, they're not governors! - of the BBC. Eight of these were appointed today to join chairman Michael Grade and three other survivors from the board of governors on the new BBC Trust, which comes into being in January.
What does this list tell us about the future governance of the BBC? Perhaps we should look back to January 2004, when the governors faced the biggest crisis in the BBC's history and were generally agreed to have messed it up, losing their chairman and director general in consecutive days. The personnel then were: Gavyn Davies, Richard Ryder, Sarah Hogg, Fabian Monds, Dermot Gleeson, Angela Sarkis, Robert Smith, Ruth Deech, Ranjit Sondhi, Merfyn Jones, Pauline Neville-Jones, Deborah Bull. All fully paid-up members of "the great and the good", and none with deep experience of broadcasting.
Fast forward to the class of 2007 and one thing is clear: there are a good few people there who understand broadcasting. Grade himself, plus Patricia Hodgson, Richard Tait and David Liddiment - these are heavyweights who would bring plenty of experience to bear in the event of a Hutton-style crisis. Add in two trustees with some experience of broadcasting bodies and a couple of newspaper journalists and it's clear there's a lot more media expertise than there was three years ago.
This is the result of explicit policy from Grade. He has championed the appointment of heavy-hitters with experience of media and corporate affairs as a signal that the BBC would not allow itself to succumb to another Hutton.
Nevertheless the members of the new BBC Trust are hardly a different type of people from the old crowd: this is still very much a "great and good" list. Forget all the right-on rhetoric about the public being involved in the selection of trustees: the new appointees come from the same quangocracy as their governor predecessors. Perhaps that's fair enough: the best training for serving on one of the most eminent of publicly-funded bodies is presumably to have served on various other publicly-funded bodies.
But apart from preventing Hutton-esque meltdown, the trust's main job is to represent the public and defend their interests in supervising the way in which management spends the licence fee. Grade has argued for this new system of governance because it is supposed to toughen the scrutiny and make the governing body less susceptible to management "capture". Is that really any less likely with this new team, especially as many of the trustees have past (or present) connections with the BBC? The basic contradiction inherent in entrusting governance to people who are also enjoined to be champions of the same organisation was fudged in the white paper and won't be materially affected by today's appointments.
