BBC begins hunt for a new 'cut-price' Director-General

THE BBC has launched a search for its next Director-General, who will be paid substantially less than the £671,000 salary of the incumbent Mark Thompson (above).

An international firm of headhunters has been appointed to produce a "succession plan" for the position, despite the fact that Thompson has not made any move to leave, the chairman of the BBC Trust, Lord Patten, has told The Times.

Lord Patten insisted that Thompson is under no pressure to go, explaining: "I want us to be able, when the time comes, to have an intelligent view of who are possible successors and where successors should come from and what sort of job we would want them to be doing."

The Times reports rumours that Thompson could stand down following the Olympic Games, seeing it as a good time to go after confirming the £700 million of cuts in response to the six-year licence fee freeze and the moving of key services and 2,300 jobs to BBC North in Salford.

Lord Patten insists that the headhunting firm Egon Zehnder has been tasked with outlining the sort of people the Beeb should be looking for rather than individual candidates. But he added it would suggest a "degree of almost superhuman resilience" if Thompson remained in the position beyond 2015.

Thompson, who replaced Greg Dyke in 2004, has weathered controversy and criticism over the last few years, including 'Sachsgate', when Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand made offensive comments during a Radio 2 show, and the editing of a trailer to give the false impression that the Queen had stormed out of a photo shoot.

Earlier this month The Economist named BBC's director of vision George Entwistle, director of news Helen Boaden and chief operating officer Caroline Thomson as possible successors to Thompson.

But will the cut in salary put them off applying for one of the biggest roles in broadcasting? Lord Patten believes that when the time comes to make the appointment "some people will crawl over broken glass to get the chance of doing it". ·