Roy Greenslade: Fairhead has lost trust and BBC role must stop

I have a lot of time for Margaret Hodge, chair of the Commons Public Accounts Committee and Labour MP for Barking, despite some obvious grandstanding when questioning big business chiefs.

I have a lot of time for Margaret Hodge, chair of the Commons Public Accounts Committee and Labour MP for Barking, despite some obvious grandstanding when questioning big business chiefs.

She knows it goes down well with her constituents in one of London’s poorest boroughs and with the party’s supporters. But there cannot be any doubt about the sincerity of Hodge’s passion and anger on Monday when confronted by a trio of HSBC representatives.

In company with her fellow committee members, she gave chief executive Stuart Gulliver and HSBC’s former head of global private banking, Chris Meares, a rough ride when they refused to take individual responsibility for failings of oversight at the bank.

Their roughing up was slight compared with the blows aimed at Rona Fairhead, who earns £513,000 a year as an HSBC non-executive director and chair of the board’s audit and risk committee.

Her problem was compounded by the fact that her other part-time job, since September, has been to chair the BBC Trust, for which she gets “just” £110,000.

To say that Fairhead floundered in front of Hodge’s rage is an understatement. The Independent’s sketch writer, Don Macintyre, rightly called her performance “a train wreck”. Newspapers from right, the Daily Mail, and the left, the Daily Mirror, supported Hodge’s call for Fairhead to stand down from her BBC Trust role on the grounds, pun intended, that she has forfeited the trust of the people.

Although I try to avoid jumping on press bandwagons, and I concede that she has made a sensible start to her BBC Trust reign, I think she should go. The HSBC connection, and her board’s perceived oversight failures in relation to its Swiss operation, make her continued Trust chairmanship untenable.

The memory of her pathetic appearance before MPs, where people laughed aloud at her attempt to justify her lack of knowledge about the bank’s alleged tax-evasion schemes, because certain “frontline” staff had ignored “structures” and there was an absence of “a controlled environment”, will dog her forever.

Next time there is a drama, let alone a crisis, at the BBC — Jeremy Clarkson, anyone? — there will be questions about Fairhead’s competence and credibility. The corporation has quite enough problems without having the chair of its Trust under continual fire.