The BBC chair, Richard Sharp, has resigned after being found to have breached public appointment rules for failing to declare a connection to a secret £800,000 loan for the UK’s former prime minister Boris Johnson.
While this breach of the rules does not necessarily invalidate his appointment to the role at the public service broadcaster, Sharp said his position was no longer tenable and called it a “distraction from the corporation’s good work”.
Sharp’s decision to resign comes as the BBC continues to face suggestions that it has become too close to the Conservative government after years of sustained political pressure and threats to its funding.
Who is Richard Sharp and what was his role at the BBC?
Sharp, 67, previously worked as a Goldman Sachs banker and is a former Conservative party donor. He was appointed chair of the BBC in early 2021.
The part-time position involves overseeing the BBC’s operations and managing relationships with the government. Sharp said he would give his £160,000 BBC salary to charity, after making an estimated £200m fortune in banking.
Regarded as a canny and smooth operator, and with powerful friends in Downing Street, Sharp was an economic adviser to Johnson when he was mayor of London, and the boss of the current prime minister, Rishi Sunak, when he was a junior banker at Goldman Sachs in the early 2000s. In 2020, Sharp took a position as an adviser to Sunak, who was then the chancellor.
Sharp, who read philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University, was chair of the Royal Academy for seven years, a director of the Olympic legacy board and has held directorships including at the International Rescue Committee. He sat on the Bank of England’s financial policy committee from 2013 to 2019 and is a former member of the board of the Centre for Policy Studies, the thinktank set up by Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s.
Sharp has also given more than £400,000 to the Conservative party, and voted for Brexit.
How did Sharp get the job as BBC chair?
The BBC’s governance and funding structure is closely tied to the British state. Ministers control the BBC’s main source of funding by setting the rate of the licence fee and also can make appointments to the BBC board.
One of the jobs that ministers control is that of BBC chair, the person running the corporation’s board. The BBC’s charter requires the government to run a “fair and open competition” for the job, with the government’s choice of candidate subjected to a public cross-examination by a parliamentary select committee before they are installed.
In February, Sharp faced an uncomfortable grilling by MPs on the culture, media and sport committee, at which he revealed that he had personally informed Johnson and Sunak that he wanted the job before he applied.
Why was Sharp investigated?
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, during the period Sharp was applying to be BBC chair.
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 told MPs that Blyth had been attending a private dinner at his house in September 2020 when the Canadian executive 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.
Sharp introduced Blyth to Simon Case, the head of the civil service, to 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 had not realised 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.
Why is Sharp resigning?
Sharp’s resignation follows an investigation by the commissioner of public appointments that concluded Sharp broke the rules by failing to declare his link to the secret £800,000 loan made to Johnson, creating a “potential perceived conflict of interest”.
The decision comes after months of mounting pressure and intense scrutiny from MPs for “significant errors of judgment” in failing to declare the potential conflict of interest.
In January the commissioner for public appointments launched an investigation into the circumstances surrounding Sharp’s appointment. The damning report by Adam Heppinstall KC on how Sharp was recommended for the job of BBC chair by Boris Johnson was published on Friday morning.
The investigation was particularly damning on how the application process for the position was handled, finding that Johnson personally approved Sharp’s appointment, 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.
It said that, upon applying for the role, Sharp should have told the panel the position had been discussed with the prime minister, given the potential threat to the independence of the BBC.
The Cabinet Office had previously said the appointment process was “rigorous”, conducted according to the public appointments code, and that “all the correct recruitment processes were followed”.
What happens next?
Sharp intends to step down in June.
The government will be able to select a new BBC chair on a four-year term, depriving a potential Labour government of making its own appointment until mid-2027.
Who could replace Sharp as chair of the BBC?
The government can rapidly appoint one of the BBC’s other non-executive directors as acting chair.
They include the broadcaster Muriel Gray, financier Damon Buffini, or Robbie Gibb, a board member who was previously Theresa May’s communications chief and has pushed a pro-Conservative agenda within the BBC.
The corporation’s board has no powers to block or oust a BBC chair. Only in extreme circumstances can the BBC chair be forcibly removed if ministers conclude they are “unable, unfit or unwilling” to continue.
