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Hats off to Rona Fairhead, the former Financial Times executive who will succeed Lord Patten as chairman of the BBC Trust. It requires a brave spirit to take on this poisonously politicised role — and Fairhead starts with the disadvantage that everyone thinks they know the roll call of candidates who might have been preferred but declined to apply, including her own former boss Dame Marjorie Scardino, for whose job as head of Pearson, the FT’s parent, Fairhead was passed over last year. But a mole tells me she’s ‘as steely as she’ll need to be’; and leading ladies of the non–executive circuit (she’s on the boards of HSBC and PepsiCo) are also full of praise, though one says: ‘She must like stress.’
Meanwhile, a subplot of this selection was the treatment of current BBC Trust member Nick Prettejohn, a respected City figure who was named in July as the shortlist’s last man standing — the Prime Minister having let it be known he would prefer a woman to win.
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