Will the sleaze row scupper Dacre's Ofcom ambitions?

The law of unintended consequences makes its presence known in, well, unexpired ways.

- SEAN O'GRADY

One, for example may prove to be shoe-horning the rebarbative figure of ex-Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre into the chair of Ofcom, the media regulator. Put bluntly, while the government was quietly working hard to construct a uniquely Dacre-shaped vacancy at Ofcom, and a Dacre-friendly mechanism to get him into it, without that much media or political attention, the whole process will now, after the botched plan to rescue Owen Paterson from his own stupidity, be subjected to the most intense scrutiny by all concerned. Before, it was probably odds-on that, somehow, Dacre would be appointed to prosecute a war on “wokery” at the BBC (ie “challenging” its supposedly complacent, biased ways and “metropolitan elite” culture); now he will probably have to withstand a tumult of abuse and criticism, and a concerted attempt to block him. It’s not corruption, any of this, but it is more what John Major called “the whiff of ‘we are the masters now’”. Oliver Dowden, lately culture secretary (and who didn’t manage to get Dacre into the role) and now Tory chairman, says that it isn’t corrupt because if it was then Dacre would be in the job already. True enough, but we may not have to wait long for another go.

Dacre has, after all been interviewed for the post once already, in May, and was found to be “not appointable”. Reading between the lines, the job description wasn’t broad enough to give Dacre the kind of power of discretion he’s been used to for most of his journalistic career – in other words he couldn’t really do what he wanted to do, so the failure of that application was maybe more a matter of mutual consent than it seemed.