What happens now Lord Patten has gone?

As Lord Patten stands down as chairman of the BBC Trust, Raymond Snoddy examines both his legacy and the implications of his early departure – and suggests some likely candidates for a replacement.

It’s as if the papers have permanent headlines already set up and ready to go: BBC in Turmoil, BBC in Crisis.

In truth it almost always is, or at least capable of throwing up events sufficiently controversial to merit a never-ending crisis in the eyes of the Daily Mail.

In the scale of how they produce crises at the BBC, the unexpected resignation of Lord Patten as BBC chairman rates as low-level turmoil and amounts to a crisis only to the extent that an unwelcome level of uncertainty has been created.

Lord Patten, who has always appeared to have too many jobs for one person beyond normal retirement age, is absolutely right to put his health first following heart surgery.

And as he has said beguilingly, the job turned out to be ten times worse than he ever imagined it would be. The non-stop attacks on the BBC by the right-wing press and the relentless march of unpredictable happenings made it a much harder job, he admitted, than being chairman of the Conservative Party or the last British governor of Hong Kong.

Lord Patten’s personal decision, for understandable reasons, should be seen as neither turmoil nor crisis, but more of an opportunity for the BBC.

It would have been much worse if Lord Patten had struggled on as a lame-duck chairman conserving his strength until April 2015 when his term runs out.

Better by far to take a few months out now to chose a successor who can be making the public case for the BBC by the autumn, and can provide continuity through the general election campaign and on into licence fee and Royal Charter negotiations.

Lord Patten was an unlucky chairman of the BBC. He didn’t invent Jimmy Savile and could scarcely be blamed for curious editorial decisions at Newsnight – to put it at its mildest. Yet even accepting that he was given a bad hand by historical standards, his record was mixed.

He appeared too often as insouciant and languid as if he thought, at least at the outset, that he had just picked up a wonderful ceremonial role – like his chancellorship of Oxford University.

He survived his George Entwistle mistake – just – by finding an able replacement in Tony Hall.

Lord Patten could have been more forceful in tackling another problem not of his making; the over-generous payments to departing brethren by their mates.

The BBC chairman did, however, have logic on his side – it is difficult to break legal employment contracts and the BBC Trust was deliberately and specifically forbidden from interfering in the day-to-day management of the BBC.

The Trust was set up to create daylight between the representatives of the licence fee payers and the board of management of the BBC – something never totally grasped by the otherwise splendid Margaret Hodge who chairs the Commons Public Accounts Committee.

Apart from crises that haven’t yet happened, the next chairman of the BBC Trust will have five central problems to cope with: the very existence of the Trust itself, the impact from the report into Savile, the future of the licence fee, the negotiations over a new Royal Charter and, perhaps most important of all, selling to the public the very point and purpose of the BBC.

He or she had better be good. Very good. As Lord Patten has demonstrated all too clearly, it is not an ideal job for a senior politician winding down towards retirement.

At least the government has decided to leave it well alone until after the general election so the new chairman will have time to read the briefs and get the flavour of the place.

To a very great extent the outcome for the BBC will depend on that election – whether there will be a government with an absolute majority, its political colour, or whether we have a continuing taste for coalition government.

As for the Trust, it would be wise to go for reform rather than knee-jerk abolition. Back to where we were before, with the dangers of regulatory capture, would seem pointless. To create a media monolith out of Ofcom by putting it in charge of the BBC on top of everything else electronic would be the worst of all possible worlds.

The size of the headache created for the new chairman by Dame Janet Smith’s Savile report will depend very much on whether any serving BBC executives are implicated by sins of omission or commission. It is more likely that because of the passing of time, it will be the reputations of retired ones which will be trashed.

The battle for the licence fee, and with it the future size of the Corporation, plus a new Royal Charter, will be a difficult one which will end up in hand-to-hand fighting before it is resolved.

It can be guaranteed that every bad and half-baked idea known to man will be trotted out for the nth time. Some of the opponents will be ideological, opposed to the extent to which the BBC, with its universal compulsory licence fee, represents an interference with free markets and individual consumer sovereignty.

The greatest danger will come from misguided souls who mean well but could ultimately cause great damage. They include the ranks of the “inside” critics who were perfectly happy to accept their pay cheques from the BBC for decades – before sticking the knife in.

The case has to be made again and again by someone who truly believes that if we are going to have a national broadcaster of scale that can stand up against the likes of Google and Microsoft, never mind BSkyB, Netflix and ITV, then the licence fee remains by far the least bad funding mechanism. Anything else is voluntary subscription and if we are not careful, over time we could create a marginalised public service broadcaster such as PSB in America.

But who? A little time to think about that – although two names might be a break from the past: Sir Howard Stringer the Welshman who spent all his career in the US and Japan and Dame Marjorie Scardino, the American former chairman of Pearson who has spent most of her career in the UK.

Dame Marjorie would be a good choice – although she might be far too smart to actually accept.