Welcome to the Whittingdale Broadcasting Corporation

This is the media age of mistrust. Editors and selected politicians don’t trust the cabinet secretary. They don’t trust civil servants, preparing new dodgy dossiers on Brexit. They remember the old dodgy dossiers signed off by intelligence chiefs, weapons of mass deception. They think – and in this EU debate say quite openly, even from a seat around Downing Street’s table – that governments tell lies, confect, manipulate, mount Project Fear. Governments and their helpmates aren’t remotely independent. Ah! Independence. The heart of the BBC pitch.

Sir David Clementi’s report on BBC governance came and went last week with few feathers ruffled. Goodbye trust, hello Ofcom: there’ll be a unitary board for Broadcasting House and a new sub-board of regulators down on Southwark Bridge Road. For the first time, the BBC will have no special treatment. It will just be another big hill on the media horizon. One regulator fits all. And who – as a conflicted trust more or less gives up the ghost – could possibly object to that?

Well, anyone who cares about independent journalism, for a start. Clementi is a former deputy governor of the Bank of England, a City man through and through. He even argues his Ofcom solution in terms of the Bank’s monetary committee. He’s very ready to trust HMG with the heavy lifting of BBC governance. Who appointed him? Why, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. If they’d appointed, say, Lord Puttnam, the report would have been different. But Secretary of State Whittingdale chose his chap.

He’ll be choosing a great many more once the Clementi formula is in operation. He’ll choose the new non-executive chairman of the BBC plus the deputy chair, the most important among other non-execs. He’ll choose four non-execs for the nations and regions. That’s six huge thumbprints for starters. And there’ll be maybe five more thrown up along the way, for Clementi reserves only three – out of 14 – top-board places for BBC men and women who actually work for the corporation, make or commission programmes, edit or control anything you see on screen.

A proven City formula moved to Portland Place? Sir David might argue thus. But giant City companies choose their own non-executives: Whitehall doesn’t inflict its own boardroom-table plan. As for Ofcom – incorporating the BBC in its overall media planning, issuing performance frameworks, balancing BBC interests against ITV and the rest – who chooses the chairman, the chief exec and the head of the new corporation-watching committee? Take another bow, John Whittingdale (with David Cameron grinning gently as selector of last resort).

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In short, the entire Clementi proposition could be a flawed fix. This “unitary board” makes creativity or dissent purely secondary concerns. It gives the BBC no clear say on who runs it or how it should be run. Nor does it address a dilemma Whittingdale himself intrinsically raised when he said: “Whether or not Strictly or Bake Off or other programmes are too removed or absolutely distinctive, that is for the judgment of whoever will have the task of assessing BBC programming”. The great question of “whoever”.

Meanwhile, the nominees of Whitehall are like leylandii, growing in every office. How does a unitary board chosen by politicians achieve any unity of purpose? The arbiters of independence have been put on indefinite leave.

But surely this a touch hysterical, you say. After all, we’re talking about British public life in all its accustomed purity. There are genteel safeguards in place that govern most public appointments. The relevant supervising commissioner has his rules and guidelines “to provide ministers with a choice of high quality candidates, drawn from a strong and diverse field”. Sir David Normington, former Home Office top mandarin, proposes: Whittingdale decides who shall chair and run Ofcom, chair and deputy chair the BBC, choose the director general, set the context of opportunity. And “deciding”, remember, also means deciding what qualities are needed (as in “let’s have a banker”), setting salaries and terms of office, constructing the surrounding scenery. You don’t need to pull strings as obviously as Turkey’s rampaging president to get your way. Gently does it just as well.

There’s a good case for seeing all this as the latest stage in government’s ancestral quest to cow the BBC. Think how Harold Wilson inflicted a bullying, non-consensual Charles Hill as chairman of the governors long ago. Think how Maggie Thatcher made William Rees-Mogg a deputy governor with the promise of making him chair (until she found a better job at the Arts Council for him). Think how easily Conservative PMs make former Conservative party chairmen head of the trust. Think how, only a couple of weeks ago, a culture secretary who wants to sell off Channel 4 anointed Charles Gurassa, a supreme sell-off expert, as C4’s new chairman. Watch how charter renewal crisis time is slithering to just after the referendum.

There’s no point in being trusting about such change. Of course unilateral beneficences – such as a rapid bit of legislation enabling iPlayer fees – are welcome. Of course kind words still butter corporation parsnips. But the BBC of Whittingdale’s tomorrow will have a government-appointed chair and deputy chair, a government-appointed Ofcom chair and BBC sub-board chair – plus a tiny executive voice at the decision-making table. The BBC of tomorrow will have three HMG place-persons in charge, not one. The BBC staff of tomorrow won’t have fellow broadcasters of their own to lobby once freedom comes under test: it will have to get on its bike to Southwark Bridge Road. The trouble with Clementi’s prescription is that it’s just too damned convenient. And a lousy – creeping, seeping – example for decent, free public broadcasters anywhere in the world.