Sunak rejects calls for BBC chair, Richard Sharp, to stand down

theguardian.com:

Rishi Sunak has rejected calls for Richard Sharp to stand down as BBC chairman, despite the businessman failing to declare his role in arranging a secret £800,000 personal loan for Boris Johnson.

Sharp has been criticised by MPs for “significant errors of judgement” over his failure to mention his role in helping to arrange the loan for the former prime minister in early 2020. Johnson later appointed Sharp, a Conservative party donor, to oversee the BBC’s board.

One problem facing the BBC is that it has no ability to remove its own chairman, who is appointed by the government. Sharp’s departure would either require him to resign of his own volition, or for him to lose the support of the government. To complicate the web of connections at the top of British society, Sharp was previously Rishi Sunak’s boss when the prime minister was a junior banker at Goldman Sachs.

Sunak told reporters on Monday that he did not want to pre-judge an inquiry by the government appointments watchdog. The prime minister’s spokesperson added: “Ministers followed the correct process in terms of the appointment of Mr Sharp. He was someone who was selected appropriately following the appropriate process.”

Diane Coyle, who served as an interim chair of the BBC Trust in 2014, said there was no easy way for other BBC board members to force Sharp out. Instead, only formal intervention from Downing Street can make the difference: “He can hang on and our prime minister doesn’t seem inclined to ask him to leave in a hurry.”

She said Sharp should have declared his role in discussing a loan for Johnson when he applied to oversee the BBC: “He should never have put himself in this position in the first place, he should have said when he got the first call ‘I