My money is on Helen Boaden (by a short nose)

Raymond Snoddy says if ever there is a time for the first female Director General to emerge it is now. No single male figure has emerged as champion and there is now a plethora of strong, experienced women broadcasters both inside and outside the BBC…

At long last the phoney war has come to an end and the wild speculation over who is going to be the next director-general of the BBC can really begin.

Everyone knew of course that Mark Thompson was leaving after the Olympics but it would have been deemed a little undignified to get the elbows out before the official announcement.

It’s going to be a vintage few months because unlike previous contests there is absolutely no clear favourite. In the past names had emerged, odds had narrowed and it was pretty certain that John Birt, Greg Dyke and Mark Thompson were going to be DGs. They just were.

This time it is possible to come up with any number of plausible characters and make a case.

The BBC has to change so you need an external candidate to shake the place up. So how about Tony Hall, general manager of the Royal Opera House and former head of BBC News? Or Mark Damazer, former controller of Radio 4, now head of St. Peter’s College Oxford – an Oxford link shared with Lord Patten, the BBC chairman.

The trouble is Hall may not want to leave his lovely job at Covent Garden and Damazar may be too intellectually comfortable in Oxford.

Not radical enough? How about the editor-in-chief of The Guardian Alan Rusbridger; Helen Alexander, former chief executive of the Economist and now President of the CBI; or Ed Richards, chief executive of Ofcom and a former strategy wonk at the BBC?

A Rusbridger appointment would give the Daily Mail a collective heart attack, Richards may have spent too long as a regulator (and has a Tony Blair taint) and Alexander has bigger fish to fry and is not interested in the job.

Former BBC One controller Peter Fincham is having too much fun at ITV to want to move – and anyway he is interested in the programmes, not the bureaucracy.

It is not a good round for external candidates for one obvious reason – the wonga… or to be more precise, the lack of wonga. It is entirely admirable for Lord Patten to decree that he wants a DG prepared to walk over broken glass for the job and accept a salary of £350,000 to £400,000 but it might limit his options among the external candidates.

That won’t stop the head-hunters drawing up an exotic list of externals including people as yet unimagined. It’s what they do to earn their money before a perfectly reasonable person that everyone knows about is finally appointed.

While the externals are always more fun you can argue just as plausibly – perhaps more so – that the BBC is a unique institution and needs someone who understands its ways – and anyway there has been quite enough change in recent years.

What you need most is a bit of stability given that 20% has to be cut from the budget and jobs will continue to go over the next five years, which brings us to the internals and five plausible candidates – Tim Davie, director of audio and music; George Entwistle, head of BBC Vision; John Smith, chief executive BBC Worldwide; and then the women – Caroline Thomson, chief operating officer of the BBC and Helen Boaden, director of news.

Davie’s background in marketing and more recently radio may not tick all the boxes… Entwistle would walk over glass and be happy with the money but the contest probably comes a year or so too early for him. Next time maybe. John Smith has done well at Worldwide but may be seen as too semi-detached from the main organisation.

Then there are the women – both internal and external. If ever there is a time for the first female DG to emerge it is now. No single male figure has emerged as champion and there is now a plethora of strong, experienced women broadcasters both inside and outside the BBC.

Apart from Helen Boaden and Caroline Thomson you could make a case for any of the following – Dawn Airey, former Channel 5 and Sky executive, now at RTL; Jay Hunt, chief creative officer at Channel 4; Jane Root, independent producer and former controller of BBC 2; Lorraine Heggessey, former controller BBC One and former chief executive of Talkback Thames; Jana Bennett, former head of BBC Vision and now president of BBC Worldwide Networks.

It’s unlikely that Dawn Airey would give up her big international job at RTL for the trench warfare of the BBC and for such a pitiful salary. Jane Root has ruled herself out of contention. Sometimes Jay Hunt sounds like a possible DG but she has been through the revolving door of too many jobs in recent years to have much of a chance this time.

Lorraine Heggessey suffers from the disadvantage of not having a big job at the moment following her abrupt departure from Talkback Thames, while Jana Bennett would probably have been in a stronger position to apply when running all of BBC Television in the UK.

By process of elimination, this could lead us to a straight cat-fight between Thompson and Boaden. Here Boaden has the advantage of coming from a journalistic programme-making background and the director-general is also the editor-in-chief of the BBC’s vast news organisation.

You don’t have to be a programme maker to become DG but most have been. The main exception was the management accountant Michael Checkland and the world didn’t fall apart as a result. If the BBC Trust decides it wants the smack of firm management then it could go to Thomson.

There is a widespread opinion in the BBC about Boaden. It goes like this… she may have became more corporate as she climbed the slippery pole but she remains, noticeably a human being. This is a rare commodity in large, highly political organisations such as the BBC.

As most of the big structural decisions have already been taken a key characteristic of the next DG must be the ability to inspire the troops and argue passionately for the BBC in the run-up to Charter renewal.

So on current, incomplete information, analysis leads to Helen Boaden by a short nose. But then the only certainty is that the job will not go to James Murdoch.