The Times is claiming an exclusive with its report that Lord (Chris) Patten will be the next chairman of the BBC Trust.  It says that Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt will put his name forward for confirmation by the Prime Minister next week.  

Chris Patten was in line for the job of BBC Chairman eight years ago, but ruled himself out.  This is an interview he gave at the time to Jackie Ashley of the Guardian:

Still looking for trouble at (nearly) 60
Jackie Ashley talks to Chris Patten
The Guardian, Thursday 11 March 2004 17.52 GMT

Chris Patten is less the Tories' lost leader than the confirmed leader of Britain's Christian Democrats - pro-European, Catholic, keen on public service, highly civilised. This party doesn't exist, of course, but you can't have everything.

Just a few weeks ago he was being tipped as the frontrunner in the race to become the BBC's new chairman. But he has ruled himself out, despite being "very flattered" by the idea. Why? "I don't want to be neutered for the next five years," he replies."I want to come back from Brussels and actually get stuck into one or two debates. One thing which is obvious is you can't be chairman of the BBC and sound off on things."

Yet his analysis of what has gone wrong sounds more like a call to arms than anything that anyone else has said about the BBC lately. "I certainly don't think that Dyke should have gone," he says firmly, and nor should Gavyn Davies have resigned after Lord Hutton's report. "I think he behaved extremely honourably, but I don't think I was necessary for him to go. It was, to put it mildly, a surprising report." Was he was gobsmacked by Hutton? He pauses. He then explodes with laughter.

"If I was still required to be as vulgar as party chairmen have to be, I could say that I had been gobsmacked by the double whammy of a lashing of the BBC, and the assumption that the way in which the government behaved in relation to the joint intelligence committee, among other things, was normal behaviour for a government. Among other things, for the report to be followed by that howling dervish performance round the studios from the former director of communications, rather than an immediate statement from the government, that that was it, that was over. The BBC matters frankly a lot more to the nation's health than Alastair Campbell."

And the BBC itself? "I start from the position of thinking that the BBC is one of the great things that this country does, and I think it's amazing that we spend so much time overhauling, investigating, having a nervous breakdown over the BBC. A number of American commentators were saying at the end of the Iraq war that they'd found themselves turning to a state-owned broadcaster, and away from privately owned broadcasters because they thought they were getting the truth. Fusses about Andrew Gilligan should not stop one from recognising what even Alastair Campbell says is a great organisation."

As to who should become the new chairman, Patten declines to suggest a name, but says: "It does need to be somebody who will stop apologising for the BBC. It used to irritate me when I was a minister, if it's not doing that, it's not doing its job."

Patten's comments about the "surprising" Hutton report reflect his views about the war. He comes out as a pretty full-scale critic. Tony Blair was quite right, he begins, by asking the questions about intervention he raised in last week's speech: "He identified all the right issues. Since the 1648 treaty of Westphalia, the basis of international law has been that one sovereign nation doesn't invade another - that's clearly no longer a basis for international law."

People like Ken Clarke and Robin Cook had been "manifestly right on Iraq. They could have been jumping up and down - 'I told you so' - a great deal more than they have ...

"What we know is that there wasn't a relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. Terrorist groups have been attracted to post-Saddam Iraq like ants to honey. We know that the inspection regime and sanctions were incredibly effective because there aren't any weapons of mass destruction. But it's fair to say that Saddam Hussein was awful. The world is better without him. I'd wish we'd taken a strong a view about his human rights abuses in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the western world was by and large backing him because he was fighting Iran."

Patten is still our EU commissioner until the end of October: I ask how much damage he thinks Iraq did to Britain's European relations. "I think, unfortunately, it's confirmed opinion in much of Europe that we were still semi-detached from the rest of the union." He has doubts about the current British strategy of moving closer to France and Germany in the EU because of the dangers of upsetting the other members and the difficulties of getting hard results on agriculture reform or liberalisation. "If some people thought this would be a way of breaking into the marriage, then I think Mr Chirac has made it clear that's not on."

He thinks Blair still wants Britain in the euro but lost his best chance: "I always believed that we should have had the euro referendum near the beginning of his administration rather than putting the decision in Mr Brown's back pocket." Could he have won it then? "Yes, I think he could ... We'll be in the eurozone one day, and everyone will wonder what the fuss was all about ... "

He is modestly flattering about Michael Howard's leadership of the Tories. Both Labour and the country needed "an opposition that was run by the adults". He is as hostile to the Tory opposition to tuition fees as ever - not just as the chancellor of Oxford, as he points out, but as the chancellor of Newcastle, too: "In parts of inner Newcastle only 33% of the kids stay on after 16. That poverty of expectation has to be dealt with."

He confesses only to enjoying the EU job "on the whole", though he found it "a bit of anticlimax" after being the last governor of Hong Kong. He doesn't expect to return to frontline politics, noting that only Roy Jenkins came back from Europe to a career in British politics, and he had to start his own party to do it.

Jenkins, he adds, "demonstrated how wonderful it is to be a serious troublemaker in your 60s". Patten turns 60 in May. Does he plan to be a serious troublemaker ? "Yes, I want to be a constructive troublemaker, but trouble does have to made from time to time. I certainly don't want to come back and become a sort of smooth part of the establishment with a beautiful polished carapace of honour and dignity."

The CV

Christopher Francis Patten

Born May 12 1944

Education St Benedict's, Ealing; Balliol College, Oxford

Family Married, three daughters

Career history Conservative research department and civil servant 1966-79, MP for Bath 1979-92; junior minister 1983-89, secretary of state for the environment 1989-90, chairman of the Tory party 1990-92, governor of Hong Kong 1992-97; chairman of Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland 1998-99; EU commissioner for external affairs 1999-; chancellor-elect University of Oxford 2003