The Spectator’s Notes | 23 June 2012

In the Tintin books, there are Thompson and Thomson (‘without a p, as in Venezuela’). So it is with the BBC. Mark Thompson is the Director-General, and Caroline Thomson is the Chief Operating Officer. The latter now seeks the former’s job. It is impossible not to laugh at the perfection of Miss Thomson’s BBC pedigree. Her father, Lord Thomson of Monifeith, was a Labour minister, a European Commissioner and a television duopoly mogul. Her husband, Lord (Roger) Liddle, was a special adviser to the Labour minister and founder of the SDP, Bill Rodgers, and was later a special adviser on European Affairs to Tony Blair, and then a member of Peter Mandelson’s cabinet at the European Commission. Miss Thomson herself was political adviser to Roy Jenkins when he led the Social Democrats in 1983. The chief selector for the post of Director-general is Lord Patten of Barnes, the Chairman of the BBC Trust, the most pro-European of all senior Tories and himself a former EU Commissioner.