When the saga of the double-decapitation of the two most senior BBC executives comes to be written, historians might care to trace it back to Dougie Smith, a shadowy backroom fixer once described as the most powerful political figure you’ve never heard of.

Google “Dougie Smith” and not much will come up, beyond the fact that he was one of the organisers of Fever, a sex party business that hosted lavish orgies in posh London venues. But his day job – splitting his time between Conservative HQ and No 10 – involved getting the “right” people into the “right” roles.

Mostly, that involved vetting each and every Tory potential candidate for parliament with what observers called a “vice-like grip”. But, according to Tim Shipman, now The Spectator’s political editor, he also paid very close attention to inserting right-thinking people into quangos and public posts.

In June 2021, Shipman wrote a piece for The Sunday Times headlined “How the Tories weaponised woke”, which revealed how Smith had been instrumental in getting his longstanding friend Sir Robbie Gibb onto the BBC board.

It is one of the oddities of governance that five out of 13 members of the supposedly independent BBC are, in fact, appointed by the government of the day. Each region has a representative, and Smith had noticed that Dr Ashley Steel, a below-the-radar former KPMG executive who represented England, would be stepping down.

“He pressed for months to see Sir Robbie Gibb, the former No 10 communications director, put on the board of the BBC, forcing it through despite a lack of enthusiasm from Johnson,” wrote Shipman.

An analogy would be a fixer for Gordon Brown nominating Tony Blair’s chief spin doctor, Alastair Campbell, for a seat on the BBC board. Imagine the furore.

“He kept putting Robbie’s name on the list and Boris kept taking it off,” Shipman reported one of his sources recalling, adding: “The plan to send Paul Dacre, the former editor of the Daily Mail, to run broadcasting watchdog Ofcom is from the same playbook.”

Smith and Gibb had known each other since the days when they had been members of the Federation of Conservative Students, a group o