I thought I recognised the name Dido Harding, when her name popped up on the news recently. After all, Dido isn’t the commonest of names. There’s Dido, the excellent singer, and Dido Twite, the heroine of Black hearts in Battersea and other stories by Joan Aiken. And, of course, the original, wonderful and tragic Dido, Queen of Carthage, abandoned by her lover Aeneas when he discovered a higher destiny than loyalty to her.
Dido Harding, by contrast, is no singer, heroine or forsaken queen. Instead, she’s a perfect embodiment of the irremediably corrupt political system the UK now enjoys.
Her name reappeared when she was announced by the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, on 7 May 2020 as the person appointed to direct the new ‘world-beating’ (B. Johnson) coronavirus ‘test and trace’ system in England. In his session with the House of Commons Liaison Committee on 27 May, Boris Johnson called her a ‘senior NHS executive’. This is not true. Harding is not a member of NHS staff, but a businessperson, drafted into the NHS originally as ‘chair of NHS improvement’. And the test and trace system isn’t run, as you might expect, by the NHS or another public body, but by Serco, the company that has benefitted from innumerable privatisations and public contracts. Serco has built a strong reputation over the years for inefficiency, money-wasting and law-breaking (it has already illegally released the email addresses of some of its Covid-19 contact tracers).
How the UK government let this large contract is a mystery. There seems to have been no transparent process of competitive tender. Equally mysterious is how Dido Harding came to be in charge of the operation of the project, which includes the ill-fated Covid-19 app, swab and antibody testing, contact-tracing, and national surveillance and immunity certification.
And yet, at the same time, there’s little real mystery, when you start to uncover Harding’s background and history.
She had a handy start in life. She is the daughter of the late John Charles Harding, 2nd Baron Harding of Petherton, an Army officer and hereditary peer. She went to a private school, and the University of Oxford, where one of her friends was David Cameron. A Harvard MBA prepared her for a series of jobs in large businesses, before she was appointed as CEO of TalkTalk in 2010. Not content with this post she gathered several others: in 2014 she became a non-executive director of the Bank of England’s Court (she chairs its Remuneration Committee), and a director of the Jockey Club, which runs Cheltenham Racecourse.
During her time in charge of TalkTalk, in October 2015, the company ‘lost’, through hacking, the personal and banking details of about four million of its customers. Harding was severely criticised for her ignorance about the hacking issue and her incompetent response to this disaster. The Information Commissioner’s Office imposed a record fine of £400,000 on the company for ‘abdicating its security obligations’. TalkTalk lost £42m and over 100,000 customers. Any ordinary CEO would have been withdrawn to a less damaging position. But Harding had little to fear from failure. Her friends and contacts would protect her.
By this time her old friend David Cameron had elevated her to the House of Lords, as Baroness Harding of Winscombe, in September 2014. She took the Conservative whip. (In 1995 she had married John Penrose, Conservative MP for Weston-super-Mare since 2005 and a junior Minister from 2010 to 2019.)
In May 2017 Harding finally left her job at TalkTalk and five months later, despite her disastrous performance there, she emerged, after an open recruitment process, as the Minister’s ‘preferred candidate’ for the new post of Chair of the Board of NHS Improvement (salary: £62,000 for 2-3 days a week). The House of Commons Select Committee on Health, which examined her appointment, commented on her complete lack of experience of the health world, and was worried enough to express the curious ‘hope that Baroness Harding will show her full commitment to the NHS while in this role in her own personal decision-making’. It also recommended that, in the light of her new position, Harding should give up the Conservative whip in the House of Lords. This she failed to do.
One of the many failures of the Johnson government in managing the Coronavirus crisis was the decision to delay lockdown. For two weeks in March it allowed the virus to rampage through the country. The decision to allow mass gatherings of people to go ahead almost certainly helped to spread the disease faster. The largest of these was the Cheltenham Festival, which attracted over 250,000 people between 10 and 13 March 2020. The Jockey Club’s selfish and disastrous decision not to cancel the Festival will rank as one of the worst examples of ignoring the obvious danger and putting people’s health at risk. Presumably, as a director, Harding had a part to play in the Jockey Club’s decision, and possibly in its earlier lobbying of the government to allow the Festival to proceed. (She has remained silent on the matter).
Whether Harding will make a success of her current job is open to doubt. Most observers think that the virus is still circulating so strongly that the test and trace system, even if it works, will not have a large effect. How ready will people contacted via the system be to self-isolate, after the Dominic Cummings affair? The associated app, trialled on the Isle of Wight and criticised for its data insecurity, has disappeared without trace. Early reports suggest that Serco’s practical arrangements for recruiting and training trackers are chaotic. This is yet another example of the government’s ideological preference for top-down national English schemes, reliant on failed companies like Serco and G4S, instead of making use of public health professionals in local authorities and elsewhere. (It’s true, of course, that the government has deliberately weakened the ability of local government to operate public health schemes.)
If she fails, Harding is unlikely to be impeded in her effortless sweep through the public world*. Her story is a perfect case study in how those who control contemporary Britain maintain their power, wealth and connections, at the expense of the interests and even the health of most other people. The main lessons she teaches to the eager ranks of young Tories lining up behind her are: make good use of the education and social connections your parents have bought you; exploit your networks ruthlessly; collect as many jobs and other positions as you can, even if they conflict; ignore failure and criticism; never apologise; make yourself indispensable to those in authority; and, last but not least, always behave as if your good fortune is the result of your natural genius.
*Update, August 2020. It was reported on 17 August that Dido Harding has been appointed by the UK government to lead the body that will replace both the soon-to-be-scrapped Public Health England and the existing ‘NHS’ test and trace system.
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