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. It must be almost irresistible for this ancient regime to go on appointing its own members, like the Soviet Politburo in the late 1970s.

Roger Liddle writes a plucky little pro-European blog for Policy Network. I kept the one he filed in July last year entitled ‘Europe confounds its Anglo-Saxon doubters’. Writing about the Greek ‘rescue’ at that time, he said ‘We have witnessed once again an absolutely classic British underestimation of the underlying dynamic of European integration’. ‘I am confident,’ said Roger, ‘that Europe will now do whatever it takes.’ The really frightening thing is that, even now, he might still be right.

Alexander Surtees Chancellor has been made a Commander of the British Empire. The title does not fit the personality — Alexander has never shown the slightest inclination to command the British Empire — but the honour is certainly due.