Gratitude

Tory peer Lord Bates of Langbaurgh is proposing that the Chairman of the BBC Trust should in future be elected by licence-fee payers. Election failure, if only in his own constituency, was what sent Chris Patten on the road to the Lords. As chairman of the Conservatives, he's widely credited with winning the 1992 General Election, only to lose his seat in Bath.

Spookily, Lord Bates, as plain Michael Bates, was a beneficiary of the Patten campaign in 1992, becoming MP for Langbaurgh, defeating Labour's Ashok Kumar. The constituency was abolished for the 1997 general election, when he stood in the similar seat of Middlesbrough South and Cleveland East, but lost - to Ashok Kumar.