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The British American Project (BAP), the BBC and New Trust chairman Rona Fairhead

The acting chair of the BBC Trust this year was Diane Coyle, an early recruit to the BAP at the same time as Naughtie and Peter (now Lord) Mandelson. The new BBC trust chair, Rona Fairhead, is a close Tory friend of Chancellor George Osborne. Lord Stevenson, (a key figure in the BAP network and in the 2008 banking collapse), appointed Rona Fairhead to her first senior position at Pearson Publishing.

Margaret Hill, BBC chief editorial adviser, is a long-standing member of the British American Project whose members now seem to fill more and more of the time of the corporation’s cash-strapped current affairs output. Newsnight’s Jeremy Paxman was for many years poster boy on the BAP website (his photograph was recently removed); James Naughtie and Evan Davis, (now with Newsnight) regularly host the BBC Radio 4 Today programme with frequent BAP guests including David Willetts, Col.Bob Stewart, Ed Miliband and Douglas Alexander. A typical Today schedule is likely to contain three or four BAP members, none of whom disclose their membership to the listeners who have funded their extracurricular transatlantic bonding through licence fees or taxes going towards the Foreign Office subventions to the BAP.

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