Welcome to Ofcom: The new head of the media regulator will need a tin hat

Quite a few of our public institutions have been described over the years as a “bed of nails”.

Few today qualify as such more handsomely than Ofcom. The new chief executive, Sharon White, is the Treasury official in charge of restoring Britain’s public finances to health, so she is no stranger to a challenge.

And there is no shortage of challenges at Ofcom. The most pressing is the proposed merger between BT and EE, on which Ofcom might be expected to take some sort of view. As the new company will be the largest player in both fixed-line and mobile telecoms it certainly deserves to have some attention from the authorities.

As the entity charged with delivering ultra-fast broadband to the nation – including scandalously underserviced rural areas – BT’s health is a matter of vital strategic economic importance, and, with so many digital technologies now converging, will be central to national competitiveness in the years ahead. She might also push for an examination of whether the BBC’s behemoth of a website, free of any commercial obligations and funded by the licence fee, is offering fair competition to other media organisations’ web services. Such an assessment is long overdue.

On top of all that, Ms White will need to consider the wider future of the BBC, prospects for ITV – surely itself a bid target before long – and the desirability of Sky’s current grip on major sporting rights.

Daunting as all that is, none should cause Ms White to lose too much sleep. What may discomfit her more will be the attentions of the media she is, at least in part, regulating. The press will be scrutinising her every move. A mandarin in the 1990s under Tory governments, she cannot be labelled some metropolitan lefty, as her predecessor Ed Richards was. But she may, nevertheless, reasonably expect some vulgar abuse during her term of office, whatever she does. A bed of nails indeed.