Mother they called Airhead who fought all the way to the top
WHEN you shatter glass ceilings, it helps to have thick skin. That’s something Rona Fairhead has had to learn the hard way on her journey to the brink of becoming the first woman to lead the BBC in its 91-year history.
At the Financial Times, where she was made chairman and chief executive in 2006, boorish male journalists nicknamed her ‘Rona Airhead’, in the belief that she owed the job to genderbased tokenism rather than talent.
Now, male MPs are making similar noises, with Conor Burns, a Tory who sits on the Commons committee that will vote on her appointment, expressing ‘enormous’ regret ‘that the Government seems determined to appoint a woman simply because it’s a woman, rather than go out and find the best person’.
Others, including Conservative Philip Davies, have voiced concerns about her involvement in recent pay- off and money-laundering controversies and lack of experience in broadcasting.
There are also dark rumours of political cronyism.
Mrs Fairhead, who was educated at
‘Tough, ethical and likeable’
Yarm Grammar School and still speaks with a hint of her native Teesside, is married to wealthy merchant banker Tom Fairhead, who is a former councillor and senior figure in Kensington and Chelsea Tory circles. The couple, who have two teenage sons, and a teenage daughter, live in a £4million home in Holland Park, West London.
They are friendly with George Osborne and his wife, Frances. Mrs Fairhead’s links to the Cameroonian establishment extend to her agreeing to become one of the PM’s ‘business ambassadors’.
She also happens to sit on the board of the Cabinet Office alongside Sir Jeremy Heywood, Britain’s top civil servant, who is regarded as the most powerful backstage fixer in Downing Street.
Strangely, given the need for the BBC appointment process to be seen as unimpeachable, Sir Jeremy happens to have been the most senior member of the selection board which interviewed her for the new job. Quite what the members of the Commons culture, media and sport committee will make of this incestuousness when they interview her next week is anyone’s guess.
Yet if history is any guide, Mrs Fairhead, will take criticism on the chin. She has, after all spent the last 30 years on a sharp-elbowed climb through the boardrooms of corporate Britain.
A tenacious professional, who cut her teeth as a management consultant, she has spent the past two years battling breast cancer, while holding down directorships of PepsiCo and HSBC, along with the Cabinet Office role.
Former Whitehall mandarin Ian Watmore yesterday described her as ‘a class act… tough, ethical and likeable’.
Mrs Fairhead joined the Financial Times, as chief financial officer in 2002, and began to achieve public prominence as a protégé of Marjorie Scardino, who had in 1997 become the first female FTSE 100 chief executive as boss of the title’s parent firm, Pearson.
Mrs Fairhead’s time at the FT’s helm, from 2006 onwards, saw the newspaper become hugely- profitable. But she decided to leave the company in 2012, after failing to be appointed to succeed Dame Marjorie. Although the move was voluntary, the firm gave her a pay-off of £1.1 million, and allowed her to keep millions more in share options.
That prompted a shareholder rebellion which saw 37 per cent refuse to endorse Pearson’s renumeration report.
The controversy has eerie parallels with that which engulfed the BBC Trust last year, over revelations that senior managers had been given £1.4 million in unnecessarily big pay-offs.
Mrs Fairhead, who describes her hobbies in Debrett’s as ‘skiing, scuba diving, flying and family’, has never publicly discussed the affair.
If confirmed in her new post, she must not only restore public confidence in the credibility of a BBC Trust severely compromised by the Jimmy Savile affair, but also oversee negotiations for the renewal of the Corporation’s charter, which is due to expire in 2016.
It’s an unenviable job, but – as woman with a meteoric career and as a member of Bournemouth Flying Club – Rona Fairhead will relish the challenge.