According to a 2007 Times profile, Dido Harding was “known as an accomplished networker”. Since then Harding’s big breakthroughs, culminating in her key government Coronavirus role, came from people close to David Cameron. Harding went to Oxford with Cameron. In 1995 Harding married John Penrose, who became a Tory MP in 2005 and a junior Minister under Cameron in 2010.

Harding worked at management consultants McKinsey (where she met Penrose) and then at retail firms like Tesco. Her big leap came in 2010 when Harding was the “surprise” choice as Chief Executive of mobile and broadband firm Talk Talk.

Charles Dunstone was the billionaire behind Talk Talk backing Harding’s appointment: he was  a former “New Labour”-supporting businessman, but switched allegiance to Cameron (who attended his 2009 wedding). Dunstone became a key member of Cameron’s “Chipping Norton Set.”

Under Harding, Talk Talk was fined £3 million by Ofcom for “dishonest, misleading or deceptive conduct” in overcharging customers in 2011, and fined £400k  in 2017 by the Information Commissioner for a “failure to implement basic cyber-security measures” behind a massive leak of customer information . Harding left Talk Talk in 2017, for other opportunities.

Harding was made a Conservative Baroness by David Cameron in 2014, and was given a seat on the Board of the Bank of England by George Osborne in 2014. 

Harding was made Chair of NHS Improvement by Jeremy Hunt in 2017. Harding explained how she got the job to MPs on the Health Select Committee: “since I decided to leave Talk Talk, I have been discussing with many people how I could best make a contribution to improving front-line public services. In the course of those discussions I met the team at the headhunters Odgers Bernstein, and it is they who first suggested that I consider applying for this role.”

Odgers Bernstein is run by Tory Peer Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone – who as plain old Virginia Bottomley was a Tory Health Secretary in the 1990s, so has a passing acquaintance with Cameron. 

Harding said she also “consulted widely across the sector including with current and former ministers “ to prepare for the NHS Improvement job. Not every candidate gets to talk to “current and former ministers”, but they can if they have friends in high places.

Harding was appointed a non-executive director of Mind Gym, a psychologically oriented business-training company, in 2018. Mind Gym was founded by Chief Executive Octavius Black, an Eton schoolfriend of David Cameron.  Harding remained a director of Mind Gym until October 16 2020, finding time to work for the firm even after she was put in charge of Test and Trace.

In May 2020 Matt Hancock made Harding the Chair of Test and Trace, and in August 2020 Hancock made her chair of the National Institute for Health Protection. Under Harding Test and Trace has – to put it kindly -  struggled, suggesting that being “an accomplished networker” is not always the same as being good at the job. 

End of the road for Boris?

I HATE to shock Morning Star readers, but it turns out that some people who had high hopes of Boris Johnson are a bit disappointed.

I’ve already written about the “buyer’s remorse” some solidly Tory institutions have been showing about Johnson.

You can read worries about Johnson’s “competence” in the Times, and the even more firmly blue Telegraph and Mail: Really the Tory establishment knew that Johnson was, even for them, untrustworthy and unreliable. But they got a huge shock from Jeremy Corbyn taking the Tories majority and hamstringing Theresa May in 2017 , so they were all willing to get behind Johnson as the only man who would play the Brexit card in the crassest way possible, in a  kind of “pull handle in case of emergency” way.

Covid-19 has shown that this gamble was an election winner, but at the cost of corroding the state to a frankly dangerous degree. I would not be surprised if the Conservatives replace Johnson before the next election, once he has been around long enough to take responsibility for the current grim mess.

If I’m right, that shows a cynical knowing-ness in the centres of power. But another kind of “buyer’s remorse” – shown by a Labour Lord, Baron Glasman, shows greater naivety.

In an article for well-funded right-wing website Unherd, Glasman – the leader of the “Blue Labour” organisation – claims that Johnson understood the “political importance of the working class” and promised them “economic intervention,” only to be blown off course by Covid-19.

Unherd is funded by investor Paul Marshall, a former LibDem supporter turned Brexit enthusiast. He likes paying for supposedly “left wing” people to talk nonsense. 

Glasman claims that Johnson, because he backed Brexit, “could speak for England in a way that Labour could 80 years previously. The Conservatives broke with Thatcherism with their talk of levelling up and a regionally targeted Keynesian industrial policy. They grasped the framework of a new era in which there was a more constructive role for the state in the organisation of the economy, a significant role for the working class and for the places where they lived — which had been desecrated and neglected for half a century while the Conservative Party was committed to the City of London, the primacy of finance and the magic of the market.”

Only thanks to Covid-19 coming and Cummings going, the Tories have resorted to centralisation, cronyism and generally screwing over ordinary people. 

Glasman is obviously right about what the Tories are doing now. But he is embarrassingly wrong about what they were going to do before Covid-19: for a supposedly sophisticated Labour thinker to believe Johnson really would deliver a convincing  “levelling up” Keynesian programme to win over working people outside London is, well a bit cringe-making.

I think it shows that, where Blue Labour say they have found a new way of representing working-class interests in Labour, they really will swoon for the most transparent right-wing nonsense as long as it has a thin veneer of “traditional values” and nationalism.