Patten's previous...

I'm indebted to the BBC's Jem Stone for tracking down this 2004 Guardian interview by Jackie Ashley with, as he then was, Chris Patten.  He was tipped for the BBC chair then, but ruled himself out, saying he was "flattered", but didn't want "to be [politically, I hope] neutered for the next five years".

Other key quotes "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".

And on Kelly/Gilligan/Hutton ? "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."