The decision to hand former BBC Trust chair Rona Fairhead a peerage and make her the new international trade minister has bewildered some and gone down badly with Brexiteers. It seems a bit random for Rona to get the gig given her past career highlight was being paid £10,000-a-day during the HSBC tax avoidance scandal. Doubly odd for Theresa May to appoint someone with close Cameroon links – Fairhead and her husband, ex-Tory councillor Tom, are very friendly with George Osborne, hardly a supporter of the government. Can the appointment perhaps be explained by Fairhead’s friendship with arch-Remainer Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood? Rona sat on the Cabinet Office board with Heywood and it was Heywood who interviewed her for the BBC job. Sir Jeremy is a big Rona fan, so you can understand why this decision is being treated with deep scepticism by Tory Brexiters. An appointment which speaks volumes for the elitist chumocracy revolving door that Theresa May claimed to oppose…

Cathy Newman gave BBC Trust chair Rona Fairhead a going over on Channel 4 News last night for earning half a million quid from her second job at HSBC. On top of the £110,000-a-year she trousers from her 3 day week at the Beeb.

Tune in tonight where Cathy will surely be grilling another taxpayer-funded broadcast boss. Terry Burns is paid a salary of £100,000 for five days a month, which, like Rona, is topped up with a six figure second job as a director at a bank, Santander.

Except Cathy isn’t going to be grilling him this evening, because Burns is the chairman of Channel 4…