Forum for former BBC staff

Forum for former BBC staff
http://www.ex-bbc.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl >> News and Comment >> "Cameron wants female to chair Trust" http://www.ex-bbc.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?num=1399805445 Message started by Administrator on May 11^th, 2014, 10:51am

Title: "Cameron wants female to chair Trust"
Post by Administrator on May 11^th, 2014, 10:51am

This is taken from the Sunday Times:

PM wants woman to head BBC
by Tim Shipman and Marie Woolf Published: 11 May 2014

DAVID CAMERON wants to recruit the BBC’s first female boss whose job will be to clean up the broadcaster’s “failed” governing body.

Senior government sources say the prime minister is determined to appoint a woman as head of the BBC Trust to act as a regulator of the corporation’s activities following the Jimmy Savile affair.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, the communications minister Ed Vaizey said the new chairman should behave as a watchdog rather than a “cheerleader”.

In a coded attack on the outgoing head Lord Patten, who is standing down because of ill health, senior figures said his successor must have reform of the Trust as “one of the first things in their in-box”.

Patience Wheatcroft, the Conservative peer, and Dame Marjorie Scardino, the former Pearson boss who was the first female chief executive of a FTSE 100 company, are being considered by Downing Street as leading contenders.

The frontrunner is thought to be Baroness Hogg, a crossbencher who is married to the former Tory cabinet minister Douglas Hogg and was once John Major’s Downing Street policy chief. The acting chairwoman, Diane Coyle, is also in the running.

A senior Whitehall official said: “There has never been a woman running the BBC before. The prime minister would like to see that.”

To read the full article you will need to subscribe to The Sunday Times.