Chris Patten: a big disappointment all round

Chris Patten has held almost every great and good job the great and the good can offer: Governor of Hong Kong, Companion of Honour, European Commissioner, Chancellor of the University of Oxford and Chairman of the BBC Trust. Only his parents’ decision to send him to a Catholic church will prevent him becoming Archbishop of Canterbury and winning the game of establishment bingo with a full house.

Patten features in Peter Oborne and Frances Weaver’s strange polemic against British supporters of the Euro. (Strange because Gordon Brown and the Labour Party stopped Britain joining the Euro so the authors have no crime to accuse the “guilty men” of – other than being wrong.) Their dissection of the folly of the BBC and Chris Patten, the man now charged with regulating it, however, is a palpable hit because it raises wider questions about corporate governance.

BBC bias in favour of the Euro or any other obsession buzzing in the minds of the liberal upper-middle class is hard to study because those who perpetuate it are unmanly journalists.