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Tag: sharp

  • Sunak under pressure to stop choosing Tories for BBC jobs after Sharp row

    Sunak under pressure to stop choosing Tories for BBC jobs after Sharp row

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    Rishi Sunak is under pressure to stop appointing Conservatives to key positions at the BBC after Richard Sharp’s resignation prompted criticism the party had undermined the broadcaster by flooding it with cronies.

    Sharp quit as BBC chair on Friday morning after an investigation concluded he had failed to disclose key information about his relationship with the former prime minister Boris Johnson when applying for the job in 2021. Sharp helped facilitate an £800,000 loan guarantee for Johnson when he was in the running to take over the broadcaster but did not tell the appointments panel.

    His resignation plunges the BBC into another period of uncertainty and mires the Tories in a further row over the behaviour of some its most senior members and appointees. It follows the recent resignation of Dominic Raab as deputy prime minister over bullying allegations and the sacking of Nadhim Zahawi as party chair over his tax affairs.

    Richard Sharp resigns as BBC chair – video

    But it also gives Sunak an unexpected opportunity to put his stamp on the broadcaster by appointing a new chair for a four-year term.

    Lucy Powell, the shadow culture secretary, said Sharp had caused “untold damage to the reputation of the BBC and seriously undermined its independence as a result of the Conservatives’ sleaze and cronyism”. She called on Sunak to run a “truly independent and robust” recruitment process for Sharp’s replacement, saying that only this could “restore the esteem of the BBC after his government has tarnished it so much”.

    Ed Vaizey, the Conservative peer and former culture minister, said the prime minister should make sure the next appointments process was “beyond reproach”.

    Peter Riddell, who was public appointments commissioner when Sharp was given the job, said Johnson had been “conflicted” during the appointments process. He called on Downing Street not to leak the name of a chosen successor over the coming months in an effort to put off other candidates.

    The report by the barrister Adam Heppinstall found Sharp had created a “potential perceived conflict of interest” by failing to tell an interview panel in late 2020 that he had discussed the BBC job with Johnson prior to sending in his application. Johnson went on to appoint Sharp to the job, months after friendly media outlets had been briefed that the former Goldman Sachs banker was Downing Street’s choice for the role.

    Sharp was also criticised for not disclosing a discussion with the head of the civil service during the recruitment process, at which he introduced a man who would later organise a £800,000 personal loan facility for Johnson. At this time the prime minister was struggling with his personal finances due to the costs of his divorce. It is still not known who ultimately loaned him the money.

    Sharp, a Tory donor who was previously Sunak’s boss at Goldman Sachs, quit on Friday morning. He concluded his continued presence at the BBC “may well be a distraction from the corporation’s good work”, while saying the lack of disclosure during the application process had been unintentional.

    BBC director general Tim Davie
    The BBC director general, Tim Davie. Photograph: Hannah McKay/AP

    Sharp had originally indicated he intended to fight to save his job, but he ended up resigning immediately after its publication. Tim Davie, the BBC director general, was spotted visiting Sharp’s house on Thursday afternoon, prompting speculation the chair was encouraged to quit.

    The investigation into Sharp’s appointment was particularly damning on the way the application process for the job was handled. Other candidates were put off from putting forward their names for the BBC job by the perception it was already lined up for Sharp, while at every stage it was made clear Downing Street wanted him to have the job.

    Sunak will have the opportunity to select his preferred candidate for BBC chair, with the hiring process – and the independence of the preferred candidate – likely to be subject to enormous external scrutiny. The government has the ability to appoint the chair of the BBC and several other directors, in addition to setting the amount of money it receives from the licence fee.

    One Downing Street source said they had been blindsided by Sharp’s resignation, given the indication he intended to fight on. “The PM really hasn’t been thinking about a successor to Sharp,” the source said. “He’s been focused on lots of other things, but not this.”

    Rather than immediately accept Sharp’s resignation, the government has asked him to remain in the role for two months so it can select an interim chair before starting the lengthy process of finding a full-time replacement.

    Under the terms of the BBC’s charter, the temporary chair has to be one of the seven non-executive directors who sit on the broadcaster’s governing board. They include public figures such as the former television presenter Muriel Gray, the financier Shumeet Banerji, the Welsh academic Elan Closs Stephens and the accountant Shirley Garrood.

    The most explosive option available to Sunak would be to appoint the former BBC journalist Robbie Gibb, who became Theresa May’s director of communications when she was prime minister. He was appointed to the BBC’s board as a director by Johnson’s government and has repeatedly criticised perceived anti-Brexit and anti-Tory bias in the corporation’s output.

    The simplest option would be to give the job to Damon Buffini, the deputy chair, who has been tasked with improving the BBC’s commercial performance. Another leading candidate is Nicholas Serota, the chair of Arts Council England.

    Nicholas Serota, director of Arts Council England
    Nicholas Serota, director of Arts Council England. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

    The government will then have to start the process of recruiting a full-time chair of the BBC to serve a fresh four-year term. This gives Sunak the unexpected opportunity of putting a Tory-backed appointee in charge of the BBC’s board until 2027, making it harder for a potential Labour government to shape the national broadcaster if it wins the next election.

    Sharp’s resignation comes at a troubled time for the broadcaster, which is facing a financial crisis after 13 years of cuts to its funding under a Conservative-led government. This week MPs criticised it for being too slow to move away from its traditional television and radio channels towards a digital future, saying the BBC risked being made irrelevant by rivals such as Netflix.

    Michelle Stanistreet, the general secretary of the National Union of Journalists, said Sharp “had lost the dressing room, he had lost the respect of senior figures in the broadcasting industry and besmirched the reputation of the BBC”. She urged the government to appoint a chair who would champion public service broadcasting.

    Labour has called for the recruitment process, which is likely to take most of the summer, to be transparent and independent. The party is already running its own panel to review the workings of the BBC, which met for the first time last week. It will come up with policy proposals on strengthening the BBC’s independence from government, especially when it comes to appointments.

    But top BBC appointments have always been in the hands of the government of the day, an influence that Labour may be loth to give up if it wins the next general election.

    In his resignation statement, Sharp said that “for all its complexities, successes, and occasional failings, the BBC is an incredible, dynamic, and world-beating creative force, unmatched anywhere”.

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    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

  • Baillie Gifford winner of winners James Shapiro: ‘I draw a very sharp line between fiction and nonfiction’

    Baillie Gifford winner of winners James Shapiro: ‘I draw a very sharp line between fiction and nonfiction’

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    Serendipity dictated that the American writer and academic James Shapiro received the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction’s Winner of Winners award, given to celebrate its 25th year, at a ceremony in Edinburgh. In his teens and early 20s, Shapiro tells me as we talk over Zoom the morning after his victory, he would often hitchhike from London to the Edinburgh festival as part of his immersion in the plays of Shakespeare. This period in his life sowed the ground for his acclaimed book, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, first published in 2006. He was, he explains, recovering from the “awful experience” of studying the playwright in middle school; every summer for several years, he would save up enough money to come to the UK on a Freddie Laker plane, “where you could fly from New York to London for $100 round trip and sleep in church basements and for 50p see spectacular productions”.

    In London, Stratford and Edinburgh, he’d see 25 plays in as many days, “and they’re all tattooed inside my skull to this day. The greatest one I saw was Richard Eyre’s Hamlet at the Royal Court in 1980 or so. Richard wrote me a note this morning, and it was so moving to me because that’s where it came from, seeing productions like his.”

    Shapiro is passionate about viewing Shakespeare through the lens of performance, the better to understand how central political and social context is to his work. He is currently advising on Tony Award-winning director Kenny Leon’s production of Hamlet for the Public Theater in New York, set in a post-Covid 2021 and starring Ato Blankson-Wood as the prince. It is, says Shapiro, “a Hamlet that speaks to the now. And I have the street cred, as we say in Brooklyn, to tell Shakespeare purists, whatever that means, that these plays have always spoken to the moment. And to think that what Olivier did or Kenneth Branagh for that matter is where Shakespeare stops, is to be as unShakespearean in one’s thinking about Shakespeare as possible.”

    James Shapiro with his Baillie Gifford winning book 1599.
    James Shapiro with his Baillie Gifford winning book 1599. Photograph: The Baillie Gifford Prize

    His vision for 1599, a microscopic look at the critical year in Shakespeare’s life when he was working on Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and the first draft of Hamlet, was not initially endorsed. His application for a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in the US in the late 1980s was turned down twice, he remembers. “I wasn’t discouraged by that. I just felt they didn’t understand that I was trying to do something different.” The “something different” was to understand the immense anxieties of the age: the country poised on the brink of invading Ireland with a 16,000-strong force; the fear that Elizabeth I’s reign was approaching its end with no clear successor in sight; the strengthening possibility of another Spanish Armada. It’s no coincidence, says Shapiro, that Hamlet opens with men on the ramparts, nervously watching for hostile forces.

    He was also frustrated with an academic orthodoxy that relied on speculation and anecdote, as well as an outmoded concept of the playwright: “The Shakespeare that existed when I was writing that book was still very influenced by Coleridge’s sense that Shakespeare was from another planet, or Ben Jonson’s line: he was not of an age but for all time. And that just struck me as completely wrong.” Instead, Shapiro wanted to ground Shakespeare in reality, finding out what the weather was each day of that single year, who he met, where he travelled.

    Shapiro is also a judge on this year’s Booker prize for fiction, and he is fascinating on the distinction between his work and that of novelists. He admires “the way that creative minds can tease out things that are less visible to those of us who deal in facts”. How does he feel about historical novelists – indeed, about a work such as Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, a reimagining of Shakespeare’s family that has just been adapted for stage by the RSC?

    He reveres Hilary Mantel, who was, he says, “a great historian, as well as a great novelist.” And he is, he replies, very happy for O’Farrell: “She deserves great success for that and for her more recent book, but it’s not a book that I can read comfortably, because it’s fiction.”

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    “I draw a very sharp line between fiction and nonfiction,” he adds. “I think that the danger of fiction is to sentimentalise. So that’s one of the things that I’m extremely careful as a Shakespearean not to do. On the other hand, I understand how deeply people want to connect with Shakespeare the man, with Anne Hathaway, with Judith Shakespeare: they lived, they died, their internal lives went largely unrecorded. And it takes a talented writer to bring that to life. But that’s not the stuff that I do. I don’t write that; but somebody needs to.”

    His next work is called Playbook, and will focus on America’s Federal Theatre Project of the 1930s, a progressive attempt to bring drama to mass audiences that was targeted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Then, as now, and as in the 16th century, theatre is powerful, and Shapiro intends to do everything he can to defend it.

    • 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro (Faber & Faber, £14.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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    #Baillie #Gifford #winner #winners #James #Shapiro #draw #sharp #line #fiction #nonfiction
    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

  • Richard Sharp was Boris Johnson’s toxic legacy – never again should politicians pick a boss for the BBC | Jonathan Freedland

    Richard Sharp was Boris Johnson’s toxic legacy – never again should politicians pick a boss for the BBC | Jonathan Freedland

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    A word of advice for anyone who has worked hard to acquire a reputation they cherish: if Boris Johnson approaches, if he comes anywhere near, run a mile. Richard Sharp is the latest proof that, even out of office, Johnson continues to act as reputational napalm, laying waste to careers and turning good names bad.

    Sharp joins a long list that includes Christopher Geidt, who had the poison task of serving as Johnson’s adviser on ethics; Allegra Stratton, whom the former prime minister said had “sickened” him when she joked about a party in Downing Street, even though he had attended several himself; and the one-time rising star civil servant and current cabinet secretary, Simon Case, quoted this week as having said of Johnson, “I don’t know what more I can do to stand up to a prime minister who lies”. Each entered Johnson’s circle as a respected figure; each was diminished by their contact with the reverse Midas, the man who rots everything he touches.

    One question left by Sharp’s resignation as chair of the BBC is: what took him so long? He hardly needed to wait for today’s report by Adam Heppinstall KC, with its verdict that Sharp’s failure to disclose his role in brokering an £800,000 loan arrangement for Johnson represented “a breach of the governance code”, to know that he could not possibly continue in a job whose defining duty is to maintain the independence of the BBC. As the former director general John Birt said a month ago, Sharp was “unsuitable” for the role, thanks to “navigating a loan for the prime minister at exactly the same time as applying for the job at the BBC. It’s the cosiness of that arrangement that made it unsuitable, and I wish the cabinet secretary had called it out.” (The cabinet secretary being Case, serially Midased by Johnson.)

    According to those inside the BBC, Sharp had been a capable chair. But the manner of his appointment meant he could never do the job properly. Witness last month’s row over Gary Lineker’s tweet, aimed at Suella Braverman’s language on migrants. That was a moment when you might expect the chair to lead from the front, publicly explaining either why impartiality is central to the BBC’s mission or why it was vital that the BBC not succumb to government pressure – or both. Instead, Sharp was mute and invisible, too hopelessly compromised as the man who had helped bail out a fiscally incontinent Tory prime minister to say a word.

    It’s baffling that all of this did not occur to Sharp himself long ago – including right at the start, when he submitted his job application and was required to identify any conflicts, or perceived conflicts, of interest. The fact that he didn’t mention his role in the Johnson loan, even though he had discussed the issue with Case, suggests he knew that it looked bad – that it would give rise to the “perception that Mr Sharp would not be independent from the former prime minister, if appointed,” as Heppinstall puts it. Given he knew the importance of perceived, as well as actual, neutrality for the BBC, that silence was itself disqualifying.

    Boris Johnson
    ‘Many have been diminished by their contact with Boris Johnson the reverse Midas, the man who rots everything he touches.’ Photograph: Charles McQuillan/PA

    His grudging resignation statement suggests the penny has still not dropped. Dominic Raab may have started a fashion for passive-aggressive Friday departures, because Sharp was insistent that his breach of the rules was “inadvertent and not material”. Still, he invited our admiration for his decision “to prioritise the interests of the BBC” since “this matter may well be a distraction from the corporation’s good work were I to remain in post”. Er, yes, just a bit. Again, if preventing a distraction was Sharp’s concern, he should have gone the moment this story broke. As it is, he’s left multiple questions still to answer – including whether Johnson should not have recused himself from the appointment process on the grounds that he had an egregious conflict of interest, given that he knew Sharp had helped him out with the loan.

    What’s needed now is not just a new BBC chair, but a new way of doing things. Even if he hadn’t got involved in Johnson’s personal finances, Sharp was hardly a non-partisan figure. He is a longtime, high-value donor to the Tory party, to the tune of £400,000. True, political parties, Labour included, have been appointing allies and chums to this role since the 1960s, but that practice needs to stop. Lineker distilled the case nicely: “The BBC chairman should not be selected by the government of the day. Not now, not ever.”

    This goes wider than the BBC: there’s a slew of public jobs that might appear to be independently appointed, but that are quietly filled on the nod, or whim, of Downing Street. But it’s with the BBC that independence matters acutely. To understand why, look across the Atlantic.

    This week’s announcement by Joe Biden that he will seek a second term had to fight for media attention with the firing of Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson. That’s because Carlson had become second only to Donald Trump in influence over the Republican party, able to make senior elected officials and aspirant presidential candidates bend to his agenda and ideological obsessions – even when mainstreaming previously fringe, and racist, ideas like the “great replacement theory”, with its claim of a deliberate, if shadowy, plot to replace white Americans with a more diverse and pliant electorate.

    Fox News itself, with its repeated amplification of the big lie of a stolen election, is partly responsible for why nearly two-thirds of Republican voters do not believe a demonstrable fact: namely, that Biden won office in a free and fair contest in 2020. Today’s America is a land of epistemic tribalism: knowledge is not shared across the society, but rather dependent on political affiliation. There are red state facts and blue state facts, and which you believe comes down to which media you consume – which social media accounts you follow, which TV networks you watch.

    In Britain, there have been efforts to lead us down that gloomy path. There are partisan, polemical TV channels now, desperate to do to Britain what Fox has done to America. And Johnson was Trumpian in his contempt for the truth, determined to create a world of Brexit facts that would exist in opposition to the real one. But if those efforts have largely failed – and if Johnson was eventually undone by his lies – that is partly down to the stubborn persistence in this country of a source of information that is regarded by most people as, yes, flawed and, yes, inconsistent, but broadly reliable and fair. Trust levels in the BBC are not what they were, and that demands urgent attention, but it is striking nonetheless that, according to a Reuters Institute study, aside from local news, BBC News is the most trusted news brand in the US. It seems that in an intensely polarised landscape, people thirst for a non-partisan source.

    The BBC should be defended – and that process starts with governments treating it as the publicly funded broadcaster it is, rather than the state broadcaster some wrongly imagine it to be. That means giving up the power to pick its boss – and getting politicians out of the way. The BBC is a precious thing – so precious, we might not fully appreciate it until it’s gone.



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    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

  • Richard Sharp resigns as BBC chair after failing to declare link to Boris Johnson loan

    Richard Sharp resigns as BBC chair after failing to declare link to Boris Johnson loan

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    Richard Sharp has resigned as BBC chair after he breached the rules on public appointments by failing to declare his connection to a secret £800,000 loan made to Boris Johnson.

    Sharp quit on Friday morning after concluding his continued presence at the BBC “may well be a distraction from the corporation’s good work”.

    An investigation by the UK commissioner of public appointments concluded Sharp had broken the rules by failing to declare his link to Johnson’s loan, creating a “potential perceived conflict of interest”.

    The investigation also found that Johnson – when he was prime minister – had personally approved Sharp’s appointment as BBC chair, while the individuals running the supposedly independent recruitment process for the job had already been informed that Sharp was the only candidate whom the government would support.

    Although this breach of the rules does not necessarily invalidate an appointment, Sharp said his position was no longer tenable and he had to quit. He intends to step down at a board meeting in June, at which point an acting chair will be appointed. Rishi Sunak’s government will then start recruitment process to find a full-time successor.

    Earlier this year, the Sunday Times revealed that Sharp had secretly helped an acquaintance, Sam Blyth, who wanted to offer an £800,000 personal loan guarantee for Johnson. The prime minister’s personal finances were in poor shape while he was in Downing Street with his new wife, Carrie, and baby son, and was going through an expensive divorce.

    Sharp decided to introduce Blyth to Simon Case, the head of the civil service, so they could discuss a potential loan. But the BBC chair insists he took no further role and there is no evidence “to say I played any part whatsoever in the facilitation, arrangement, or financing of a loan for the former prime minister”.

    He added that he did not realise he had to declare the introduction during the recruitment process for the BBC job, saying: “I have always maintained the breach was inadvertent.”

    It is still not known who ultimately provided Johnson with the loan, which became public only after he left office.

    Sharp’s resignation comes at a tricky time for the BBC, which has been hit by criticisms it has become too close to the Conservative government – and faces questions over whether it has been too heavily influenced by ministers.

    Labour’s Lucy Powell said the incident had “caused untold damage to the reputation of the BBC and seriously undermined its independence as a result of the Conservatives’ sleaze and cronyism”.

    She added: “Rishi Sunak should urgently establish a truly independent and robust process to replace Sharp to help restore the esteem of the BBC after his government has tarnished it so much.”

    The investigation into Sharp’s appointment was particularly damning on the way the application process for the job was handled. Other candidates were put off from putting forward their names for the BBC job by the perception it was already lined for Sharp. Government-friendly media outlets were briefed that Sharp was the government’s preferred candidate for the job before the application window had even closed.

    “Leaks and briefing to the press of ‘preferred candidates’ for public appointments (referred to as ‘pre-briefing’) should be prohibited by ministers,” the report concluded. “In this case such pre-briefing may well have discouraged people from applying for this role. It can also undermine efforts made to increase diversity.”

    MPs had already criticised Sharp, a financier and Tory donor, for “significant errors of judgment” in failing to declare the potential conflict of interest.

    Sharp told MPs he had been attending a private dinner at Blyth’s house in September 2020 when the Canadian businessman said he had read reports that Johnson was in “some difficulties” and that he wanted to help. Sharp said he had warned Blyth about the ethical complexities of this.

    At the time, Sharp was working in Downing Street on Covid projects, and told Johnson and Sunak of his aim to be BBC chair. He told the culture, media and sport committee in February: “I communicated to the prime minister and to the chancellor that I wished to apply and submitted my application in November.”

    The government will now be able to select a new BBC chair on a four-year term, depriving a potential Labour government of making its own appointment until late 2027.

    The part-time position involves overseeing the BBC’s operations and managing relationships with the government.

    In his resignation statement, Sharp said that “for all its complexities, successes, and occasional failings, the BBC is an incredible, dynamic, and world-beating creative force, unmatched anywhere”.

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    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

  • Negi 24pcs Mini Stainless Steel Utensils Non Toxic Indian Kitchen Set Great Kitchen Toys for Girls (Kid’s Love Kitchen Set) ( It Has Sharp Edges Not Suitable for Small Baby )

    Negi 24pcs Mini Stainless Steel Utensils Non Toxic Indian Kitchen Set Great Kitchen Toys for Girls (Kid’s Love Kitchen Set) ( It Has Sharp Edges Not Suitable for Small Baby )

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  • ‘An embarrassment’: Romney on his sharp words for Santos

    ‘An embarrassment’: Romney on his sharp words for Santos

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    image

    “Trying to shake hands with every senator in the United States — given the fact that he’s under ethics investigation, he should be sitting in the back row and saying quiet, instead of parading in front of the president and people coming into the room,” Romney said.

    “I don’t think he ought to be in Congress and he certainly shouldn’t be in the aisle trying to shake the hand of the president of the states and dignitaries coming in. It’s an embarrassment,” the senator continued, adding: “If he had any shame at all, he wouldn’t be there.”

    When asked if the senator was disappointed that Speaker Kevin McCarthy had not called on Santos to resign, Romney replied: “Yes.”

    The New York congressman bit back at Romney after the State of the Union ended, tweeting at the 2012 Republican presidential nominee: “Just a reminder that you will NEVER be PRESIDENT!”

    Earlier in the night, Vice President Kamala Harris seemed to turn around when she saw Santos as she walked to the front, according to the Daily Beast.

    Santos is facing calls from all sides to resign over his rapidly multiplying scandals. The freshman congressman recently recused himself from his committee assignments amid investigations into his finances.



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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )