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…