The cage of civil servants and proto-civil servants has been rattled by sniping at the selection of Rona Fairhead as BBC Trust chairman-to-be-confirmed. Sir David Normington, former lifelong civil servant, and now Commissioner for Public Appointments, has written to the Guardian, to say that the process exactly followed the code of practice on public appointments (author: Sir David Normington); that the panel was chaired by one of Sir David's public appointment assessors (still anonymous at this time), and not Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, as first reported in the Mail on 27 June, and unchallenged until now. One presumes Sir David would have mentioned if Lord Kakkar and Caroyln Fairbairn were not co-assessors.
Sir David quietly fumes: "Rona Fairhead won this process fair and square. Not because she was a woman. Not because she is a crony. But because she was judged by an independent panel and then by the secretary of state and the prime minister to be an excellent candidate for the job."
Sir David (Bradford Grammar and Corpus Christi, Oxford) has a first in modern history, and, with his dance partner Christine Piniger, was a prime mover in the Oxford University Ballroom Dance Club in the early 70s. They won the Open Competition against Cambridge in 1973 in Rhodes House - this under the watchful eyes of judges the Tanakas, then Japanese Ballroom and Latin Professional Champions. Oh, the joys of independent assessment.
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