Lord Patten | MediaGuardian 100 2012
Job: chairman, BBC Trust
Age: 68
Industry: broadcasting
2011 ranking: 21
There is a new man in charge of the BBC, but his name is not George Entwistle. Our panel said it was Lord Patten, the chairman of the BBC Trust, and not the new director general who holds the whip hand at the corporation following the exit of Mark Thompson.
Partly this is a consequence of Entwistle being new in the job but principally it is because Patten, the former Tory party chairman – and the man who appointed Entwistle – is such a hands-on chairman.
"The chairman of the BBC [Trust] has rarely been more powerful than he is now," said our judges. "He has just appointed a new director general and has completely seized power at the top of the corporation. He is effectively the DG."
In charge of the BBC Trust since May last year – as its second chairman, after Sir Michael Lyons – Patten is responsible for the overall strategic direction of the BBC, approves its budget and administers the occasional rap over the knuckles.
Patten rejected management's plans for big cuts in local radio – echoing executives' enforced U-turn over the closure of two digital stations, Radio 6 Music and the Asian Network – which earned him plenty of plaudits outside the corporation. He also stood up to the government over cuts in funding of the BBC World Service, which earned him plenty of admirers within it.
Patten led observers to see his appointment as a return to Reithian values when he called on the BBC to eschew "the shoddy or the vulgar" and declared: "Introducing people to good books, great paintings, or beautiful music ... helps to enrich them as individuals and to improve the quality of civic life for all of us."
He clamped down hard on executive pay (although it remains to be seen how much this stymies Entwistle's efforts to fill senior roles, beginning with the vacant BBC Vision post), and has said the BBC needs to be "much more self-confident" about itself.
It is not a quality lacked by the BBC Trust chairman, who publicly asked headhunters to start to find Mark Thompson's successor before Thompson had announced when he would go.
Patten's political career ended with his loss of his seat at the 1992 general election, although he had helped secure John Major's victory. He was subsequently made governor of Hong Kong, overseeing its handover to China in 1997, and is now also chancellor of Oxford University.
The diamond jubilee river pageant, Patten has avoided the sort of negative headlines that dogged his predecessor.
Thanks to phone hacking and the Leveson inquiry, the media's attention has been elsewhere. But for how much longer?