The government has been urged by today’s report to “review current conflict of interest guidance for candidates to ensure it is fit for purpose” in the wake of BBC Chair Richard Sharp’s resignation.
Adam Heppinstall KC’s report into Sharp’s now-fateful involvement with Boris Johnson’s £800,000 ($1M) loan also found:
- Sharp failed to disclose two “potential perceived conflicts of interest” to his BBC Chair selection panel: that he had informed then-Prime Minister Johnson that he wanted to be Chair and that he had met the Cabinet Secretary to help facilitate Johnson’s meeting with Sam Blyth, the man offering to be guarantor for his loan. Blyth and Johnson are distant cousins.
- Both the above non-disclosures breached the Governance Code because Sharp’s selection panel was unaware of them. Sharp, who has resigned today, believed he breached the code over the latter but not the former.
- During the selection process in late 2020, Sharp was the only candidate to have his candidacy “supported by Ministers,” the report said. There were 23 applicants and five were interviewed for 45 minutes each.
- “Perceptions” are as important as “actual conflicts of interest,” according to the report. “The erosion of public trust and confidence in a public office holder can be caused by the perception of a conflict of interest, as well as by an actual conflict,” it said.
A successor will now be sought over the next few weeks and Sharp will remain in post until June.
In the meantime, the government has been urged by Heppinstall’s report to initiate a “review of current conflict of interest guidance for candidates to ensure it is fit for purpose.”
Elaborating, Heppinstall said the government should forge a new section of its guidance addressing relationships and interactions between candidates and appointing ministers, and how confidential or sensitive issues might be disclosed, all of which would have been appropriate in the Sharp case.
It stressed that candidates are already asked to disclose whether any conflict of interest could “cause potential embarrassment,” an issue that has repeatedly been flagged in the case of Sharp. In Sharp’s statement, he accepted his position has become a “distraction” but called his breach “inadvertent and not material.”
The government was also urged to consider whether changes are required to the section on “standards in public life and handling conflicts.”
The Culture, Media and Sport Committee, which has been heavily critical of Sharp, said Sharp’s behavior has caused “undoubted damage” to “trust in the BBC.”
“The public appointments process and to Mr Sharp’s reputation could all have been avoided had he chosen to be more open with the facts when he appeared before the Committee more than two years ago,” it added.
