“He has steered the BBC through some of its most difficult days.”

Utter Bullshit. Patten has been at the wheel but under the affluence.

Patten is ideally qualified to be President of the USA: like Obama, he has been AWOL but taking the pay.

The man is a disgrace, collaring one unaccountable sinecure after another, at taxpayers’ great expense.

Good riddance.

Now the list of troughers and bien pensant volunteers will grow. Mandelson? Brown? Some recent immigrant (after all, that “hideously white” culture will surely get a fake makeover)?

What will not happen is the one thing which should happen: cancel the licence fee, break up the BBC, kill its internet news octopus and let it wither on its 20th century vine.