Rona

I am surprised but delighted to welcome a fellow St Catharine's, Cambridge alumnus to the Chairman's job at the BBC. Mrs Rona Fairhead won the Jacobson Law Prize, the Addersley Law Prize, and was president of the University Law Society on the way to her double first law degree. I got the lowest third in the university in my year. We both eschewed further legal qualifications. Rona is now an Honorary Fellow.

Rona Haig was born in 1961 in Cumbria, I'm guessing when her physicist father was working for the old Atomic Energy Authority; her mother was a maths teacher, but the Haig family roots were in Edinburgh. She had operations on her spine in her teens, but that hasn't stifled an active life-style. Rona crossed the Lakes and Dales to fee-paying Yarm School, where she was Head Girl. (It was Yarm Grammar School, which became part of what is now Conyers school, on a different site; the grammar school site then became fee-paying Yarm school.) At Cambridge, as well as law, she coxed an eight, took roles with a light entertainment group, and developed her love of squash. She still lists ski-ing and scuba-diving as hobbies, as well as flying from the Bournemouth Flying Club.

From Cambridge, she join consultants Bain, and was involved in the entertaining Guinness acquisition of Distillers, and found time to acquire an MBA from Harvard Business School. I shall return to her business career after a little more reseach.

Husband Thomas, a former merchant banker, has served as a Conservative councillor, Earl's Court ward, Kensington & Chelsea. Thomas Edwin comes from a long line of farming Fairheads in Essex; they married in St Catharine's College Chapel in 1992, with a grand reception to follow at Wimpole Hall, and have two boys and a girl. They rent a property on the Highclere Estate, and can probably be seen with binoculars on the regular Downton Abbey tours.