The Rajan principle

The appointment of Amol Rajan as University Challenge presenter prompts the perennial question: Why do some people get all the jobs?

Previously: Amol Nitrate: Why the BBC is so high on Amol Rajan's client journalism

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One of the questions that Amol Rajan answered incorrectly while captaining Downing College, Cambridge to a loss in a 2020 edition of Christmas University Challenge was:

Named after a Canadian educational theorist, which proposition states that in a hierarchy each employee tends to rise to the level of their incompetence?

Rajan said Maslow — famous for his hierarchy of needs — rather than Peter. But that’s perhaps unsurprising as Rajan’s entire career seems distinctly immune to the effect outlined by Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hill in 1969’s The Peter Principle, which, though based on the former’s research, was initially intended to be satirical.

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@brokenbottleboy You can't do justice to the comic timing of this with text, you need the clip

In 2003, Rajan was a researcher and (self-described) ‘mic boy’ on Channel 5 daytime current affairs fight club The Wright Stuff. By 2013, he was editor of The Independent, having joined the paper in 2007. It was a rise that included stints as a news reporter, sports writer, columnist, restaurant critic, comment editor, and crucially “private media advisor” to the title’s owner Evgeny Lebedev for 18 months prior to his big promotion.

After ushering The Independent’s print edition into an early grave in 2016, Rajan was made the BBC’s first Media Editor in November of the same year. His first ‘scoop’ in the role was that George Osborne had been appointed editor of The Evening Standard, another Lebedev-owned paper. It was a scoop in so far as he scooped up his phone and wrote down what his former boss told him.

In July, Boris Johnson finally admitted to MPs that, while Foreign Secretary, he attended parties at the Italian villa owned by Lebedev’s ‘former’ KGB agent father Alexander, without his security detail or officials being in attendance. The revelation led to BBC News finally reporting on the story, which had been revealed by The Observer in 2019 and pursued by several other outlets since.

What BBC reports didn’t include, however, was any comment from the corporation’s Media Editor. It was a curious omission given that Evgeny Lebedev, elevated to the House of Lords by Johnson in November 2020, remains a prominent media proprietor.

When Rajan was approached by Carol Cadwalladr in 2019, he responded to her questions about his connections to Lebedev by saying:

There’s no ‘relationship’ now. I don’t know much about his current world. I worked closely with him for a long time but I left a long time ago.

On his own attendance at Lebedev villa parties, he continued:

I don’t know about that. I went many, many times many, many moons ago. I was a guest at a private house. I don’t talk about it but it’s not because I owe him anything. I’ve no idea what’s going on now. I was never there with Boris.

In June 2020, Rajan once again broke a Lebedev ‘scoop’ with the news that David Cameron’s chancellor, George Osborne, would be succeeded as editor of The Evening Standard by David Cameron’s sister-in-law, Emily Sheffield.

Last year, after being set up as one of the BBC’s utility players (presenting The Media Show, popping up on The One Show, acting as a stand-in on Radio 2, and fronting documentaries including a notoriously crassly-promoted one about Enoch Powell), Rajan became the fifth member of the Today programme presenting roster.

At that point, Rajan stepped down as presenter of The Media Show but retained the title of Media Editor. It was only with today’s announcement that he’ll be the next presenter of University Challenge that he shed that role; a detail that was buried at the bottom of the press release announcing his new job.

The Toby Young Memorial Prize* for Media Egotism: Amol Rajan's self-judged, self-created award secures him the crown

If Rajan feels ubiquitous to some viewers and listeners, it’s because he is. As well as his Today programme shifts, he’s also fronted a self-titled BBC One interview show (which notably featured a soft-ball interview with Novak Djokovic) and the Rethink strand on Radio 4. The process by which Rajan became a hammer and every programme came to resemble a nail is not transparent.

However, in the case of University Challenge, we know there was at least one other candidate keen to be considered for the role. On Tuesday, after it was announced that Jeremy Paxman was standing down as host, there was lots of online speculation and support for Samira Ahmed¹ to succeed him. She tweeted:

I think you should all know: I approached University Challenge myself months ago. I’ve had an amazing time rehearsing and being a standby presenter for it this year. I’ve loved working with the fab team who seem to love me and just narrated a University Challenge documentary that’s going out on BBC 2.

And I’ve loved helping set a few questions for this series too.

But no one from the BBC has spoken to me yet about taking over. I’ve always been happy to go through an honest, fair process and be judged on my merits. I still am.

The production team and I hope the BBC know exactly why I would love to present University Challenge and why I think I’m the right person. I also got the encouragement of lovely Bamber Gascoigne who gave me his advice some years ago on what it needed. That’s what I wanted you all to know.

That Ahmed wanted the job and has worked as a standby presenter does not mean she was automatically entitled to it but that, as her tweets suggest, there was no “honest, fair process” is a problem.

In January 2020, Ahmed took the BBC to an employment tribunal. It unanimously concluded that the BBC had failed to provide convincing evidence that Jeremy Vine was paid £3,000 per episode to present Points of View while she received just £465 to present Newswatch other than gender discrimination.

The BBC’s arguments during the case included claiming that Vine deserved a bigger pay packet because he was more famous and “had a glint in his eye”. It was unable to put a specific economic value on the glint.

Perhaps Rajan has an equally compelling glint he uses on BBC executives. We will never know as the process by which he was chosen or whether there even was a process at all will not be revealed.

The Daily Mail — via its Mail+ vertical — which has its own reasons for attacking Rajan (including a disdain for previous republican comments that he has since squirmingly disavowed) carries anonymous quotes from BBC insiders:

‘People are seething. He gets every gig going. They pay him so much that they have to find him stuff to do.’

Another leading industry figure added: ‘When somebody becomes flavour of the month and [the BBC] throws everything at them it is not always good for them.’

They added: ‘The public can quickly feel bored if they think someone is being thrust on them all the time.’

The counter-view comes from Kate Phillips, the ludicrously-titled BBC Director of Unscripted, who says:

Jeremy leaves a very big chair to fill but Amol’s experience, expertise and sense of humour makes him the perfect fit for one of Britain’s longest running and toughest quiz shows. 

While how Rajan performs as University Challenge host remains to be seen, I’m proposing the Rajan Principle: Any media figure sufficiently capable of cosying up to those in power will accumulate jobs in inverse proportion to their merit.

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1. Disclosure: I know Samira but I haven’t discussed this situation or the contents of this edition with her.