Richard Sharp: The new BBC chairman who will have to fight for the corporation’s future

There are three things you need to appreciate about the soon-to-be chairman of the BBC, Richard Sharp. First, he is not Charles Moore. Second, he is extremely rich, by any standard. Third, he has worked with Boris Johnson as an adviser (when Johnson was mayor of London), and more recently with Rishi Sunak on the Covid crisis. He is a man they can do quiet business with: that is good for the BBC.

As an insider says of him and Tim Davie, the new director-general: “He doesn’t court publicity, but neither does he shirk difficult assignments, and he will make an excellent choice to work alongside Tim, given his relationship with the current administration.”

Sharp takes over next month, and will shortly face a confirmatory hearing with the Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport. Chaired by the thoughtful and effective Tory MP Julian Knight, it also has its share of radical intellects such as Philip Davies, who regards the corporation as a “metropolitan, left-wing, virtue-signalling” organisation that overpays its talent and is out of touch with much of the public. Davies’ encounter with the 64-year-old Sharp, said to be arrogant or charming as he chooses, will be informative, and very possibly entertaining, even if the pair find some narrow common understanding of what Sharp’s mission should be. 

The new chairman-presumptive, at any rate, is not Charles Moore and no BBC defunder. This is important. Difficult though it may be to believe that the prime minister had been about to appoint a man who won’t pay his BBC licence fee to be chairman of the corporation, that was indeed the case.  

Until he ruled himself out in October, Charles (now Lord) Moore was being pushed hard by Number 10 to take the job, publicly and privately. The salary offer for the three-day-a-week job was reportedly boosted by 60 per cent to £160,000 so as to compensate Moore for the loss of his journalistic earnings. A former editor of The Daily Telegraph, Spectator columnist and long-time Johnson associate and supporter, Moore was a high-profile advocate of Brexit. He was also an incessant critic of the BBC and much of what it stands for today (or is perceived as standing for). Moore holds what might be called old-fashioned views. “Impartial” is not a word that springs readily to mind when one considers the tweedy figure of Lord Snooty, as he is nicknamed, but as the current chairman David Clementi says, impartiality starts at the top, and strong political views are not compatible with it.  

Moore turned the job down for personal reasons. It is just as well.  

The problem with Moore wasn’t so much his entrenched hostility to the BBC’s supposed Islingtonian, woke, leftish, Remainer-y bias, but that he was such a poor fit for the role. Editorial matters are for the new director-general, who is also the BBC’s “editor in chief”, and has been making measured noises about correcting any unconscious institutional skew around the place. The chair is responsible for ensuring the corporation’s broad compliance with its charter obligations to public service broadcasting; and – crucially – for setting the long-term strategy for the BBC, including its commercial future.

It is this latter sphere where Sharp’s experience and imagination will be needed and ought to be focused. He should not and will not be pestering Davie about Gary Lineker’s tweets, Emily Maitlis’s homilies or the Vicar of Dibley “taking the knee”, though no doubt there might be some informal chats over lunch about such larks by “the talent”.

For all the talk about Brexit bias and culture wars (such as over Rule Britannia! at the Proms), the BBC’s biggest challenges are all about money. Moore has relatively slight business experience; Sharp rather more. After leaving Christ Church, Oxford, in 1978 with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics, Sharp spent eight years with JP Morgan then 23 years at Goldman Sachs, covering a very wide range of responsibilities in commercial banking, private equity, fixed income (government bonds), derivatives and across investment banking.

He left in 2007, just as the banking crisis was getting under way. Since then he has occupied himself with quite a few private partnerships in the financial sphere (SW7, DII Capital, Roundshield), as well as a variety of directorships, plus charity activity and advising the authorities. He seems as good a person as any to frame the BBC’s commercial future. Davie, coming from BBC Studios, a money-spinning business, seems an excellent partner, and those familiar with the personalities expect Sharp to be an able and supportive chair towards his DG.  

Davie, of course, has a background in Conservative politics (as a councillor in Hammersmith), and this too is probably welcome for the BBC’s supporters. Why? Well, the BBC’s enemies on the right who would love to defund it cannot dismiss this pair as Corbynite luvvies. Second, for that reason, the rational, financially grounded strategy they forge is more likely to be soundly developed and, thus, listened to. The next round of negotiations with government start imminently, taking the BBC towards the renewal of its 10-year royal charter in 2027, and thus its progress until 2037.  

The early signs from the Davie-Sharp partnership (if such it turns out to be) are encouraging. Johnson has shelved plans to decriminalise non-payment of the licence fee, because it wouldn’t work, while Davie has signalled that he wouldn’t have agreed to taking over the cost of free licences for the over 75s from the government: “Frankly, I think the idea that we picked up all of it was not the right one.”  

But that is only one of the many items on the agenda. The BBC faces other formidable challenges, not least the sheer financial muscle and audience impact of global streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and Apple TV. (Younger viewers/users are a particular worry). The BBC’s own Radio 4 last week devoted a whole segment to a breathless dissection of the latest Netflix bodice-ripper, Bridgerton, as big news, a sign of changing times. BritBox, BBC iPlayer, Sounds, Studios, the national and local TV and radio stations, the websites... all substantial enterprises in their own right, before even thinking about new joint ventures, new ownership models, new forms of financing, new technologies and anything else that can secure the BBC starts its second century properly tuned in to business and cultural currents.  

A cordial working relationship with Johnson, Sunak and culture secretary Oliver Dowden is essential if the BBC is to continue to be one of Brexit Britain’s few globally recognised brands. It will not so much be the BBC versus the Government, but the BBC as a national champion in a global market.  

As it happens, Sharp is also a bit of a Tory,  which helps too, and reputedly mildly pro-Leave. He’s still in the board of the Centre for Policy Studies, the original Tory think-tank established by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher. He has donated some £400,000 to it (mostly in 2001-10). He served as Mayor Johnson’s adviser on economic development in London, and at the Treasury since last May on the financial and economy dimensions of the pandemic. He is no stranger in these circles, and as a former senior banker at Goldman Sachs his expertise was no doubt useful (he took no fee). Yet he is not a member of the Conservative party, and has never stood for elected office for the party (nor anyone else).  

It seems likely that Sharp will be more a champion of a reformed BBC rather than treat it as an enemy to be dismantled, as the now departed Dominic Cummings regarded it. For what it’s worth, Sharp’s formal acceptance of nomination stated: “The BBC is at the heart of British cultural life, and I’m honoured to be offered the chance to help guide it through the next chapter in its history.”

His friends predict he’ll be an independent thinker and safe pair of hands. His years on the Bank of England’s Financial Policy Committee suggests he understands the concept of public service and independence. His father, Eric, later Lord Sharp, spent decades as a civil servant before going into industry and eventually becoming the chairman of Cable & Wireless, a telecoms company, back in the 1980s.  

Neither is Sharp some sort of banker-philistine. He was reportedly behind the Treasury’s £1.5bn arts rescue package, and has been a patron of the arts and arts charities, including serving as chairman of the Royal Academy. He is also a supporter of a range  of charities and companies concerned with cancer detection and treatment (a sister died young from the disease in 1982). One such, for example, is Oncimmune, a quoted PLC where he was a director and owned £7.6m worth of shares, now in a blind trust.  

It would be interesting to learn which other of Sharp’s extensive business and personal financial interests will be put on hold for the duration of his four-year term in such a sensitive position. He will need to be utterly transparent if he is not to fall foul of conflicts  

On the positive side, Sharp’s vast personal wealth will also help him maintain an extremely independent outlook. Some say he made £100m from his time in the City, which seems plausible but his total net worth may be even higher, approaching billionaire status. (Or at least was.) In 2008, the London Evening Standard placed Sharp and his then wife Victoria in its list of the most influential people in London: “The Kensington couple this year launched London Music Matters, which nurtures musical talent in deprived parts of the capital and hands out scholarships to up-and-coming violinists. Richard is a former Goldman Sachs star who retired two years ago with a fortune of about £500m.”

Sharp married Victoria Hull, whom he met through the bank, in Connecticut in 1987 and they had three children. She has since wed Simon Robey, an investment banker. Sharp’s sister Victoria is president of the Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court of England and Wales, and his father was a life peer. He is part of the establishment, whether he wants to be or not.  

A key relationship will be with the chancellor. Sunak is an ex-colleague of Sharp’s at Goldman Sachs, albeit at a then junior level, but Sharp does appear to be part of what’s been called the Sunak-ification of government. The chancellor’s allies such as Munira Mirza, Allegra Stratton and, indeed,  Carrie Symonds are held responsible for a creeping palace coup. This has seen the laddish, aggressive Brexiteers led by Cummings replaced by bright but more conventional and polite souls such as Simon Case and Dan Rosenfield as senior aides in Downing Street.

The dynamics of Downing Street may also explain why Paul Dacre, former editor of the Daily Mail and once the most feared man in Britain, was conspicuously absent from the new year honours and is yet to receive his rumoured appointment as chair of Ofcom, the media regulator. No fan of the BBC, he and Moore would have been a destructive duo. As it stands, Dacre’s description of Symonds as a “31-year old Minx who is Boris Johnson’s current bed-warmer” may have ruined his chances of preferment.  

The BBC, then, could have done a lot worse than be given a grown-up, smart,  brilliant negotiator such as Sharp to steer it into the 2020s and beyond. The institution has a valuable heritage (literally so, as the treasure trove of material found on BritBox shows), and a set of public duties that cannot be abandoned practically or politically. The BBC is part prisoner of its past traditions and craft, but also a great beneficiary of them as a creative engine unparalleled in Britain and with few peers anywhere.

In a speech he gave when a Bank of England policy maker, Sharp quoted Marx (he’d earlier cited Hayek, for balance), and his words seem very apt now as he looks at the job that lies ahead: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please: they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”