Exclusive: New Ofcom chair appointed – but will he fix Musk and GB News?

Cheshire will also take on ultimate responsibility for Ofcom’s response to GB News, which employs multiple current Reform politicians as hosts. Calls for the regulator to tackle the channel have intensified following a recent investigation led by The New World’s editor-at-large Alan Rusbridger, which revealed numerous apparent breaches of the broadcasting code.

Cheshire’s appointment, when confirmed, will mark the end of an unusually drawn-out and at times confused process. Lisa Nandy, despite being culture secretary, played no formal role in the appointment, after No 10 reassigned responsibility for Ofcom to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, making Liz Kendall the responsible minister.

Ofcom is now responsible for overseeing not just the Broadcasting Code – which governs all television channels operating in the UK – but also the implementation of the Online Safety Act, which governs the internet and social media. Cheshire has no executive experience in either broadcasting or technology companies, but was a non-executive director of BT, and was the chairman of Channel 4 until last year.

The other candidates on the final three shortlist for the Ofcom role were veteran Labour MP Margaret Hodge, best known as a combative chair of the Public Accounts Committee and now a Labour peer, and Sir Jeremy Wright, who served as culture secretary and attorney general during the last Conservative administration. The Financial Times reported last week that Cheshire was believed to be the frontrunner for the post.

Kendall had reportedly faced outcry from some Labour backbenchers for considering a Conservative appointment to a role as crucial as Ofcom chair, given how few Labour figures were appointed into such posts in the 14 years the Conservatives were in power.

The outgoing Ofcom chair, Michael Grade, who sat as a Conservative peer in the House of Lords for 11 years before resigning the whip upon his appointment, stirred up controversy last week after giving an exit interview to the Telegraph, in which he said there was “no blurring of news and comment” by GB News.

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“I would die in a ditch,” he told the newspaper, “rather than have Ofcom telling broadcasters who they can and can’t employ as presenters”. Under existing regulations, Ofcom routinely restricts when politicians can and cannot be employed as presenters, especially during election periods. 

Grade even specifically defended the channel’s softball interview with Donald Trump conducted by Bev Turner, because “it was immediately followed by a discussion where a lot of people tore into Trump”. The same interview was described by Chris Banatvala, Ofcom’s founding director of standards, who drafted its first broadcasting code, as “the most nakedly partial interview I think I’ve ever seen”.

Cheshire, who served only three years as chair of Channel 4, was brought in at a time when the then-culture secretary Nadine Dorries was mounting a serious campaign to have the broadcaster privatised. Cheshire is generally seen to have helped Channel 4’s successful efforts to resist privatisation, and continue as a public broadcaster.

The waters he will have to navigate as Ofcom chair will surely be no less political.