The Daily Mail claims today that culture secretary Jeremy Hunt has recommended that Lord Patten should become the next chairman of the BBC, and that this is now almost certain to happen. It’s a horrific prospect, and it beggars belief that the Tories should appoint this euro-bigot to the role. Any idea that this is in any way a eurosceptic administration – already highly questionable after the handling of the Irish bailout and the daylight-robbery increase in the EU budget of 2.9% – is shot down in flames. Mark Thompson finally begrudgingly accepted (after cacophonies of protest stretching back years) in December that there had been bias in BBC reporting of the EU. With the appointment of Patten, the whole topic is now off the agenda and the euro-bigots who run the BBC will be smirking all the way to their White City eyries.
One of those will be the insufferable Andrew Marr, a europhile-in-chief. It’s been revealed that he is paid £600,000 a year of our money so that he can present BBC shows in which he rams his prejudices down our throats. How much more of this profligacy can be tolerated?
The Patten can stop this:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1358509/Andrew-Marr-600-000-year-payslip-slip-revealed.html
This pay is obscene; plus they MUST be taxed as emplotee’s. Otherwise all sorts of tax fiddles are possible.
Good Lord, someone else who earns more than the Prime Minister…
But being a good Marxist, I expect he donates a good part of it to “the cause”, and all those poor, downtrodden plebs in need…
No? Shame on him!
What the hell is Jeremy the *unt thinking off, of all the daft things done by this idiotic government this really begars belief. Patten should not be a peer, he is a traitor, end of, and it should be.
Patten is just “a safe pair of hands”decision. They know he won’t do anything “Controversial” just serve time and chalk up his pension.
Every day that passes you see the Cameroons swaying in the political wind, this moment a little right, this moment a little left, still obsessed with the myth of “detoxifying the Tory brand”, as the halfwitted OkYah Notting Hill Spads advise.
The BBC keeps on punching the Coalition in the face and it refuses to hit back, so they punch them again, and again. Every day the Beeb leads with Balls says this, Balls says that, and for the last word, over to Brendan Barber to put the Labour point of view.
In a way I don’t blame the BBC, they are a nest of lefty harpies, I expect little else. I blame Hunt – for wanton cowardice.
Maybe Patton will do a Hong Kong on the bbc; and hand it over to some other undemocratic body to rule. The Guardian?
Ah -the Patten of tiny feet eh?
Like Crozier-Mandelson,Hewitt and the others- clearly there is no “job spec” or “criteria required”to be met to get these plum jobs.
To wipe a bottom in a nursery needs pages of assessments and open advertising with all manner of things to be fulfilled to satisfy higher management.
Yet Crozier can go from screwing the Post Ofiice from the F.A and then on to Channel4 or wherever. Well obviously these jobs are all pretty much one and the same-could easily confuse them I guess-so no need to actually SET any conditions-just the school tie and a short history of hopping from gilded truffle to lilypads gathering a tidy pension on top of an obscene amount of green.
Truly green-as must we be to allow this creepy nepotism and unaccountability to be so rife at the top of all our quangos and private companies that leech off the state. Blunkett would get no other kind of job-even with a disability allowance!
In short Patten should be content with his equitable life in the bosom of Oxbridge and let someone who actually has a track record in journalism to run the show. Heather Brooke since you ask…after all it is MY BBC is it not?
Patten should be a Chinese Takeaway-and let him tango dance back to Beijing to give them a lecture on trasparency and stakeholder participation-none of that nasty jobbery that goes on in China eh Chris?
The appointment of Chris Patten is a monumentally bad decision. The mere appointment of an ex-Conservative minister as BBC Trust Chairman will give the BBC the ultimate get out of jail free card regarding bias – ‘but our Chairman is an ex-Conservative, how can we be biased against them’. It’s a right royal f*** up; can David Cameron make any good Conservative decisions? I am rapidly losing patience with DC and his team, maybe UKIP is the future for right-minded people and if so, maybe I should vote YestoAV!
This appointment is to counter the threat from UKIP, who will deny the Tories a majority in the next election, and possibly become the third largest party (by votes cast). Has-been, public-pensioned, pro-EU, fat twerp in charge of the biggest propaganda instrument in the country: enough said.