Charlie

When a sub-editor chooses a question for the headline, you sense unease about the reliability of the story. The Mail offers this morning "Is Boris about to make Charles Moore – a pro-hunting, anti-licence fee Brexiteer – the new BBC chairman?"

It comes from the pen of Glen Owen, the Mail on Sunday's Political Editor, appointed two years ago. Blogger Guido Fawkes noted at the time that "Glen’s intensive prowling of the bars of Westminster for the last decade has finally paid off."  Glen will be regularly briefed by No 10, alongside other Sunday lobby journalists; he broke the story "No 10 probes MPs 'foreign collusion'" a year ago.

What qualifies the recently-ennobled Baron Moore of Etchingham to lead the BBC ?   He has not yet completed his register of interests as a life peer, but he was editor of The Telegraph, The Spectator and The Sunday Telegraph, and still writes for all three. At the Telegraph, he was Boris Johnson's editor. In May he wrote for The Telegraph, "This attempt to destroy Dominic Cummings has failed". In the same month, he opined in The Spectator that "There is a media bias against Mr Cummings more ferocious than any I have ever seen (except, perhaps, that against Boris Johnson)"

Earlier this month in The Spectator, he complained that "The BBC has given up on properly reporting China". There are no other news organisations in the UK, and few around the world, with three correspondents still in the country. 

He is a trustee and director of The Global Warming Policy Foundation, which collects his Telegraph and other articles, in support of fracking, about the BBC telling us "we shouldn’t support Brexit and we should accept climate change alarmism and we have to all kowtow to the doctrines of diversity”, and about the BBC's 'anti-meat activist'. He is an active member of the East Sussex and Romney Marsh Hunt, and has just been appointed a board member of the Countryside Alliance.

There is some theory that candidates have to apply to be the next BBC Chairman, but clearly drafting the ad is not a DCMS priority; Sir David Clementi said he wouldn't seek re-appointment back in June. In January, Charles Moore said he wouldn't put in for the other vacancy. 

"I shall not be applying to be director-general of the BBC. It was kind of Tony Hall to stand down early, forgoing next year’s centenary plaudits, so that I could rise on the wave of post-Brexit fervour. But no: I am not a woman and have no plans to become one and, under the BBC’s diversity rules, uniformity of gender is required. If I did, per impossibile, get the job, I would ensure that Nick Robinson, who has such a feel for excluded northerners, would relocate to Manchester, thus counteracting the London bias of the political coverage, but even that would not be enough. The truth is that no director-general, not even the ticks-all-boxes Sharon White, can lead the BBC’s monopoly through to its second century. The technology no longer works; nor does the concept. Bureaucracy is the enemy of creativity. The BBC can only be a bureaucracy."