“I feel a strange sense of deja vu,” I blurted out in the splendour of the wood-panelled parliamentary committee room with its battle-scene oil paintings and creepy portraits of the great and the good of past ages with eyes that almost follow you round the room.
“Sorry that it’s Groundhog Day,” Orlando Fraser QC, the subject of our MPs’ inquiry, shot back, playing his part in the masquerade but also genuinely apologetic.
We were there as digital, culture, media and sport select committee members in a pre-appointment hearing to scrutinise the government’s choice for the plum post of the nation’s charity commissioner. Nice work if you can get it; barely a couple of days work a week with a cool five-figure remuneration.
And yet those who land these posts are the same-old same-old. This week, the one up before us will be Lord Grade, the 79-year-old Tory peer fingered as chair of Ofcom. The government picks them. Then the committee gets a token grilling before they metamorphose Doctor Who style from the last post-holder, who tends to be knighted if they weren’t already decorated. Even when we recommend a “no”, as in the case of Lady Stowell, whose Charity Commission tenure has now ended and was by all accounts disastrous (predictable when people are picked for loyalty not ability), they get the gig anyway. “If I am appointed,” Fraser interspersed between responses, knowing full well he will be.
It was deja vu at last Thursday’s hearing because only in January another white bloke in a suit had been the chosen one before the same committee but that lucky winner resigned before even starting, after bullying allegations against him emerged. The government commented on a disappointing number of women and BAME applicants, then plumped for second best rather than re-advertising somewhere these underrepresented categories (the board itself has double the blokes it has women) might notice. Something has seriously gone wrong when people on boards spring from such a narrow gene pool.
There is a distinct pattern to appointees. Fraser (son of Lady Antonia and a Tory MP) protested that his political leanings should not be presumed, as he was a young man when he stood as an unsuccessful Conservative candidate in 2005 and his grandfather had been a Labour peer, I felt rather landing himself in it. He dismissed his comments on Devon girls being ugly as another youthful indiscretion but by my maths he was 37. Then there’s the Conservative scourge of wokism and the BBC licence fee in the House of Lords, Michael Grade, nephew of Lew. And the government-installed BBC director-general, Tim Davie, another failed Conservative candidate. The ability to exercise neutrality and objectivity in these roles is trumped by feeding the desires of Nadine Dorries and Oliver Dowden’s imagined war on the woke.
And when people say Labour did the same too, we can’t avoid the lack of diversity in an appointments process that throws up the same-old same-old in a depressing treadmill of chumocracy and where the toothless select committee pre-appointment interview is expected to merely rubber-stamp these “great and good”.
It was deja vu also as on committees past, I’ve questioned the likes of the chief inspector of prisons who could not recall when he’d last set foot in a prison but was well versed in going from board to board.
Is this the best the system can really throw up?
• Rupa Huq is the Labour MP for Ealing Central and Acton
• This article was amended on 27 March 2022. Tim Davie stood as a council candidate for the Conservatives, not as a parliamentary candidate as an earlier version said. And Michael Grade is the nephew of Lew Grade, not his son.
