But the most ambitiously Teflon of this sordid little group must be Baroness Diane Mary “Dido” Harding of Winscombe. She has shrewdly exploited being the most “connected” among them. Her father was John Harding, 2nd Baron Harding of Petherton and she has made the most of being friends with David Cameron while both were at Oxford.

From the start, Harding has used this start to cultivate the kind of useful links that help further careers, including:

• Trustee of DotEveryone. (A charity focussed on ensuring the digital revolution works for all of society)
• Advisory Board of The Fore Trust. (A charitable trust providing funding to early-stage charities and social enterprises)
• UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation. 
• Cross-party Advisory Board, with specific brief to assist with digital activities.
• Court of the Bank of England, incl. Chair of Remuneration Committe
• Director, British Land PLC 
• Member of Telecoms Industry Security Advisory Council
• Member of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Group
• Director of Cheltenham Racecourse
• Director of the Jockey Club 

Unquestionably bright, as well as ambitious, she holds a 1st Class BA Honours Degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Magdalen College, Oxford, followed by a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) from Harvard Business School. She parlayed these heavy-duty qualifications into work as a Consultant and Engagement Manager, at the prestigious McKinsey and Company, followed by a post as Retail Marketing Director, Thomas Cook Group.

Harding then moved swiftly through a retail career with Woolworth, Kingfisher and Tesco, before she became CEO of TalkTalk Telecom Group PLC, a £1.8bn company, in 2010. It was there that she developed many of the links listed above and developed a political network that has served her well.

While running TalkTalk, she faced calls for her to resign. In October 2015, TalkTalk experienced a cyber-attack, during which personal and banking details of up to four million customers, not all of which were encrypted, were thought to have been accessed. The company was subsequently fined £400,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office for its negligence.

When asked during an interview on City FM if the affected customer data was encrypted or not, she replied: “The awful truth is that I don’t know“. Her inflexible line on termination fees was also criticised. In all, the company admitted the incident had cost it £60 million and lost it 95,000 customers.

“The TalkTalk boss Dido Harding’s utter ignorance is a lesson to us all.”—Marketing, 29 October2015

“It has been a tough week for TalkTalk boss Dido Harding, facing complaints from customers and calls for her head“

—Evening Standard, 28 October 2015

In February 2017, Harding stepped down as CEO, explaining it was “to focus more on my public service activities”. (see bulleted list above)

As a longstanding member of the Conservative Party and friend of David Cameron, Harding was appointed to the House of Lords in 2014. During time there, she never voted against the party.  In 1996, she married John Penrose, now Conservative MP who is a neighbour of Jacob Rees-Mogg, both representing Weston-Super-Mare. Penrose had to resign as Anti-Corruption Champion due to his involvement in the Boris Johnson partygate scandal

But her own retreat to “Weston-les-deux-Églises” did not last long. In October 2017—the same year she quit TalkTalk—Harding was appointed chair of NHS Improvement, responsible for overseeing all NHS hospitals, comprising foundation trusts and NHS trusts in England.

From there, it was a short step when the Covid pandemic hit for Health Secretary Matt Hancock to announce in May 2020, that Harding was to be put in charge of the “track, test and trace” programme. Renamed “NHS Test and Trace”, this would prove to be as big a white elephant and black hole for public money as the PPE procurement fiasco. Both cost the public purse at least £40 million, for which no-one—including Harding—has ever been called to account.

“What we’ve done in really rigorously testing both our own COVID-19 app and the Google-Apple version is demonstrate that none of them are working sufficiently well to be actually reliable to determine whether any of us should self-isolate.”

—Dido Harding

In November 2020, a case was lodged to challenge the legality of her appointment.  In February 2022, two High Court judges ruled that Hancock had failed to comply with the Equality Act 2010 when appointing Harding, and also when appointing Mike Coupe as director of testing in September 2020. The court was told that Harding intervened to add Coupe, a former colleague of hers at Sainsbury’s, to the shortlist of candidates.

“Test and Trace has cost the taxpayer £22bn. It has repeatedly failed to achieve targets it has been set. It was once heralded as The Thing That Would Defeat Covid, but nobody talks about it much any more.”

—The Times, December 13, 2020

Despite all this, Harding went on to several other government appointments, including an (unsuccessful) bid to be CEO of Public Health England. Since then, she has kept a low profile, with her loyalties now focussed on money-spinning private American healthcare companies. Harding has taken on a consultancy job at Carna Health, an ambitious Massachusetts-based company that claims to be ushering in “a new era of healthcare”.Harding is also offering her “expertise” more widely through her personal consultancy, Avalon Enterprises, and through speaking gigs for Chartwell Speakers. Away from healthcare, she has also accepted a consultancy role at Vitrifi, a new telecoms business that regularly donates to the Tory Party. 

#1097—904 words