He will replace John Bauer, the present director in September 1974.
Peter Bush, the present director, says "it took someone with Max's vision to say we needed this in Britain".
The recent failure to maintain the work coincided with the arrival of the present director," he told The Independent.
When the present director-general, Gro Harlem Brundtland, took over three years ago, the sweeping of new brooms was promised.
In October Budapest's mayor named two representatives of the extreme right to direct a theatre, Uj Szinhaz, discarding the proposal of the present director.
This compared with Thompson earning almost £800,000 and also with the £450,000 that Patten's trust awarded to the present director general.
The second person named by Bhutto was Brigadier Ijaz Shah, the present director-general of Pakistan's Intelligence Bureau, the country's equivalent of the F.B.I. (Shah could not be reached for comment).
This was in part made possible by the soaring number of visitors, which jumped from 5.6 million in 2001 — the year the present director, Henri Loyrette, took over — to 8.5 million in 2008.
Of all the uproarious scandals that have recently beset the BBC – the unexposed guilt of Jimmy Savile, the tarnished innocence of Lord McAlpine – the one least easily explained as a combination of unfortunate coincidences are the lavish pay-offs engineered by what the present director-general, Tony Hall, calls its "officer class".
Hodge said a briefing note for the present director general, Tony Hall, disclosed after a freedom of information request, said Thompson had given "verbal instructions" to the lawyer drafting the compromise agreement and there was "no documented approval of the payment" to Fincham.
