The socialist pull of being able to spend & waste billions of pounds worth of taxpayers money has made a traitor of what used to be a right-winger, Lord Patten.
New BBC chairman Lord Patten defended the corporation’s right to pay large sums to top stars on his first day in the job.
He told staff yesterday that the public had the ‘right’ to expect the BBC to hire the best talent, even if doing so was ‘costly’ (hardly public service of them).
His comments come weeks after he criticised the corporation for pandering to overpaid stars when he appeared in front of MPs for a pre-appointment hearing.
At the time he suggested Jonathan Ross’s joke that he was worth 1,000 journalists was ‘an indication of things having gone wrong with that attitude to so-called celebrities’.
Taking over from Sir Michael Lyons, Lord Patten said: ‘On talent pay, the public have a right to expect the BBC to get the best writers and actors and filmmakers and so on to work for it, and that’s going to be costly in some circumstances.’(Again hardly psb).
He added the corporation had to accept it would develop performers and then see them poached (Like they poached people from Channel 4 like Graham Norton and Jonathon Ross). In recent months the BBC has lost high-profile staff such as former One Show hosts Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley, both to ITV, and agricultural specialist Jimmy Doherty, to Channel 4.
Lord Patten said: ‘When it comes to developing other sorts of talent, the BBC is inevitably going to be in the position where it brings people on and then sees them pinched by others who can afford to pay them more at a certain point in their careers.
‘But that’s part of the nature of being at the heart of public service broadcasting, and I don’t think we should be too fussed about that.’ Lord Patten, a former Tory minister and governor of Hong Kong, said he wanted to perform his new role in a ‘Reithian’ way.
He described himself as an ‘old fashioned moderate Tory’ but said he would be a ‘moron’ not to defend the BBC’s impartiality and independence (He’s a moron).
He warned that people were deluding themselves if they did not think the corporation faced ‘difficult choices’ over the six-year licence fee freeze – but said he hoped it could avoid cutting whole services. He suggested bosses should find a ‘longer-term way’ of managing senior executive pay, and expressed massive support for the BBC World Service.
Lord Patten, who has been criticised for not watching the corporation’s more populist output, also said he had watched Doctor Who, So You Think You Can Dance and Wallander at the weekend.
In March, appearing in front of MPs, he criticised the corporation’s ‘swagger’ and said it had been wrong to pay executives ‘as if they were at Barclays’.
He also spoke out against the salaries of stars such as Mr Ross, one of the BBC’s most controversial figures, who was paid £18million for a three-year contract in 2006.
The chat show host, who left the corporation last July after a string of gaffes, was Britain’s highest-paid TV entertainer.
Lord Patten’s latest comments came as Baroness Deech, a member of the Lords Communications Committee, criticised the corporation for its representation of older women on TV.
She asked: ‘Where are the white-haired ladies presenting the news?’