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The Government’s Green Paper on the BBC once again opens up the question of governance. Culture Secretary, Whittingdale himself has been categorical about the BBC Trust’s manifold sins. In a speech in 2013, he said: “I was always of the view that actually the BBC should be run in a traditional corporate structure with a board of directors with non-executives on it and it should be regulated by an external regulator, probably called Ofcom”. He sees such an arrangement as preferable to that put in place by Tessa Jowell a decade ago, whereby the Trust was an unclassifiable creature: half-regulator, half cheerleader.
Even before Whittingdale’s appointment it was clear that opinion in the Conservative Party was on the move, after five years defending Blair’s structure, especially during Chris Patten’s reign as chair of the Trust. During the election campaign, George Osborne told Radio Times that: “the Trust arrangement has never really worked. I’ve never understood why the BBC is frightened of regulation by Ofcom”.
