When tributes were paid last week to Sir Harold Evans as he picked up the Media Society's lifetime achievement award, the most memorable contribution came from Jilly Cooper, a Sunday Times columnist before she became a novelist. Cooper recalled that "the darling man" stood by her despite the raunchiness of her writing ("we wrote so much about sex in those days", she said, that the pre-Wapping paper could have been renamed "50 Shades of Gray's Inn Road"), even when a bishop reported her to the Press Council for a piece about the best cars for shagging in. However, he did censor Cooper once, when an article on a hen night described a stripper "whipping off a blue towel, and rotating his member at great speed like an English setter's tail". This was "not suitable for a family paper", the great challenger of censorship primly decreed.
Connoisseurs of Lord Patten's appearances before various parliamentary committees had thin pickings in last week's gig at the culture select committee, which offered few opportunities for his usual sly witticisms about his inquisitors (and sometimes his colleagues). And in the one satisfying spiky exchange, he failed to defeat his nemesis, the Tory MP Philip Davies. The combative Davies, who clearly shares the Daily Mail's blue-tinted view of the corporation, was questioning Tony Hall when Patten tried to intervene. Davies told him "he lost the right to ask questions when he [Patten] lost his safe seat in Bath", to which Patten's reply sulky rather than silken was that the Bath seat "was never safe". An attempted recovery, asking Davies if he had "read the report" (by the BBC Trust on a programme about welfare issues), only elicited the disappointing response that indeed he had.