The Fin­an­cial Times has a trenchant cri­tique of BBC World­wide and its impact on the pub­lic ser­vice broad­cast­ing debate.

But who exactly is the per­son ‘famil­iar with the BBC Trust’s think­ing’ that they quote? Or the lead­ing Lon­don banker? Don’t be temp­ted by the obvi­ous jig­saw iden­ti­fic­a­tion.

A per­son famil­iar with the BBC Trust’s think­ing says: “The suc­cess of World­wide has argu­ably threatened the BBC’s future more than any­thing else in recent times, by sim­ul­tan­eously provid­ing an image – pos­sibly illus­ory, pos­sibly not – of great wealth and a yard­stick, also pos­sibly illus­ory, of sup­posedly anti-competitive behaviour.”

The res­ult, accord­ing to a lead­ing Lon­don banker who is close to both main shades of UK polit­ical opin­ion, could be a fun­da­mental change in the BBC when its cur­rent guar­an­tee of licence-fee fund­ing expires in 2016. “The topic comes up from time to time, but in the past it has been too far down the agenda for the gov­ern­ment to do any­thing about it,” the banker says. “But now, there has been tech­no­lo­gical change – and gov­ern­ment change may be just around the corner, so there may well be a new landscape.”

Media’s most enter­tain­ing invest­ment banker?

It couldn’t pos­sibly be Anthony Fry, but who­ever it was could learn from the loqua­cious new BBC Trustee, as Ray Snoddy noted back in 1997:

[Fry] is that rare thing, a mer­chant banker who is pat­ently a human being and can not only tell jokes but mar­kets him­self and his bank remorse­lessly. Before appear­ing in a ses­sion on Chan­nel 5 to argue that the chan­nel would be worth pounds 1bn by the year 2000, as long as it didn’t do any­thing crazy like mak­ing fancy pro­grammes, the story had mys­ter­i­ously appeared in the Times.

Amaz­ingly, on the fol­low­ing day, before appear­ing in a ses­sion on ITV’s future as a plc, the same thing happened again. His argu­ment, that fur­ther con­sol­id­a­tion would enable ITV bosses to refill their boots, was set out in advance in the Sunday Times. How do these things hap­pen? Clearly, Fry is a media star in the mak­ing, and he isn’t even related to Stephen Fry.

Fry, the man charged with look­ing after licence fee pay­ers’ interests, is one of the people Mark Thompson invited to cast an eye over BBC Worldwide’s oper­a­tions back in 2004, a task chaired by John Smith. Who? The man who is now CEO of BBC Worldwide.

There can surely be no one bet­ter to serve licence fee pay­ers than a man who advised the BBC as a banker, and who under­stands all the com­plic­ated fin­an­cial jar­gon and inter­per­sonal rela­tion­ships that you and I would struggle so hard with…