Rishi Sunak has rejected calls for Richard Sharp to stand down as BBC chairman, despite the businessman failing to declare his role in arranging a secret £800,000 personal loan for Boris Johnson.
Sharp has been criticised by MPs for “significant errors of judgement” over his failure to mention his role in helping to arrange the loan for the former prime minister in early 2020. Johnson later appointed Sharp, a Conservative party donor, to oversee the BBC’s board.
One problem facing the BBC is that it has no ability to remove its own chairman, who is appointed by the government. Sharp’s departure would either require him to resign of his own volition, or for him to lose the support of the government. To complicate the web of connections at the top of British society, Sharp was previously Rishi Sunak’s boss when the prime minister was a junior banker at Goldman Sachs.
Sunak told reporters on Monday that he did not want to pre-judge an inquiry by the government appointments watchdog. The prime minister’s spokesperson added: “Ministers followed the correct process in terms of the appointment of Mr Sharp. He was someone who was selected appropriately following the appropriate process.”
Diane Coyle, who served as an interim chair of the BBC Trust in 2014, said there was no easy way for other BBC board members to force Sharp out. Instead, only formal intervention from Downing Street can make the difference: “He can hang on and our prime minister doesn’t seem inclined to ask him to leave in a hurry.”
She said Sharp should have declared his role in discussing a loan for Johnson when he applied to oversee the BBC: “He should never have put himself in this position in the first place, he should have said when he got the first call ‘I can’t help you with this’. But having done this, he should have declared it in his interview and select committee hearing and to his fellow board members. It seems obvious to me.”
A BBC spokesperson declined to comment on a report by BBC News that the board held an unscheduled meeting on Monday to discuss the future of itschairman.
BBC News staff are also smarting after Sharp used his appearance in front of the House of Commons’ culture select committee to suggest that some of the BBC’s own reporting on the story had been wrong.
“It’s made me aware of the consequences of inaccuracy in a very personal way,” Sharp told parliament.
If Sharp were to resign, then the natural candidate to take over for the rest of his term, which runs until February 2025, would be Sir Damon Buffini. He was recently appointed deputy chair of the BBC and had a career in finance.
One issue for the BBC is that Sharp is closely connected to the current Conservative prime minister, and any government-appointed replacement may not be so amenable to the corporation.
Despite being appointed by a Conservative government that had made clear its intention to cut the BBC down to size, he recently called for more money to support the World Service. In an interview last year, Sharp described the licence fee as “great value” and said he had previously “overestimated the fat” that could be cut from the organisation’s budget.
At the weekend, a spokesperson for Sharp expressed regret that he hadn’t made information available to the MPs who vetted his appointment and said they were awaiting the result of an investigation by Adam Heppinstall KC, who has been tasked by the government with re-examining Sharp’s appointment process.
They added: “Mr Sharp would like to apologise again to the BBC’s brilliant staff, given the distraction it has caused. He is proud of the work the board has done driving positive change at the BBC over the last two years and very much looks forward to continuing that work.”
