Elisabeth Murdoch has as much chance of landing the BBC top job as Katie Price becoming Archbishop of York

If you gathered together every straitjacket-qualifying hire ever made or floated, you’d struggle to find anything to equal the prospect of Rupert Murdoch’s daughter becoming the Beeb’s director-general, says Matthew Norman

Her CV is perhaps not the most fitting for the director-general shortlist (Reuters)

In the steeplechase for the director-generalship of the BBC, not one but two of the horses appear to be Caligula’s.

Whenever a viscerally startling personnel choice is mooted or made, dullards like me ritually trot out the late emperor’s equine bestie, Incitatus.

The reference is so mind-tranquilisingly overused that it operates as a sort of mythic ketamine on the anxious reader. But for anyone somehow unfamiliar with it, legend holds that the emperor promoted the beast to the high Roman office of consul.