Private Eye on Dido Harding and the Cheltenham Coronavirus Outbreak

There’s an interesting little snippet in this fortnight’s Private Eye for 28th August – 10th September 2020 suggesting that Dido Harding, the new chair of the interim public health authority taking over from Public Health England, may have been personally responsible for the decision to go ahead with the Cheltenham Festival in March. Among her various other posts and jobs, Harding is a jockey and sits on the board of the Jockey Club. But it seems she may not just be a board member. According to the article ‘No Horse Sense’ on page 9, she was seen meeting the Cheltenham Festival’s managing director shortly before it was decided to go ahead with the racing. Unsurprisingly, this has been widely criticised down here in the Gloucestershire/ Bristol area because it led to a Coronavirus outbreak in the town. The article runs

Baroness (Dido) Harding, chair of the new National Institute for Health Protection, is not an instinctive guardian of public health, it seems. One recent episode suggests she’s happy to sacrifice it for a day at the races.

Perhaps one of the most ill-advised events in public-health terms for some time was the Cheltenham Festival of horseracing between 10 and 13 March this year, organised by the Jockey Club – of which Baroness Harding was and is a board member.

Even before the racing started, cases in the UK had accelerated to more than 300 and policy had moved from “containment” to “delay”. Most observers were incredulous that an even crowding 250,000 people tightly together across four days would go ahead when other large gatherings were being cancelled.

Now a witness at the course early on the first morning between 6.30 and 7 am, reports Harding meeting Cheltenham managing director Ian Renton and others to decide whether to proceed or announce a late cancellation. In other words, rather than merely being a board member at the Jockey Club (as Eye 1522 revealed in connection with her test-and-trace role), Harding was central to the final decision – taken as Covid alarm mounted – to go ahead with the event. The Department of Health declined to comment on the incident.

If this is true, then it shows that Harding is completely unsuited to her new position as she clearly believes in putting the economy and corporate profit before safety and human lives. But as that’s the attitude of Boris, Cummings and the rest of them, who believed in herd immunity at the expense of the deaths of the weak and the elderly, she fits right in. 

‘I’ Profile of Dido Harding, Tory Peer in Charge of New National Institute for Health Protection

Yesterday, Boris Johnson and his viciously incompetent, murderous government decided to wind up Public Health England. They’re replacing it with a new body, the National Institute for Health Protection. The excuse is that Public Health England was too incompetent in its tackling of the Coronavirus. In fact, as a government-owned body, it took its decisions and orders directly from Johnson, Hancock and co. It is they who are responsible for its failings, and for the failure to impose a lockdown as soon as possible. This has led to the deaths of 70,000 Brits, over half of which may well have been preventable.

The new body, by contrast, seems to be a public-private partnership with the same corporate giants that have been heavily involved in the government’s own failures to tackle the virus, such as the lack of provision of adequate PPE supplies to the frontline NHS staff. Many of whom have now died thanks to Boris’ incompetence and sheer indifference to ordinary human life. Medical experts are warning that the disruption caused by the switch to the new body in the middle of the pandemic could be disastrous and cost even more lives.

And people are not impressed by the person appointed to chair the new organisation, Baroness Dido Harding. She’s a Tory peer, who owes her position in health administration  to David Cameron and has a disastrous record as the manager of string of companies. Johnson is now denying it, but it looks very much like she owes her position solely to her connections to Johnson, Cummings, Cameron and Matt Hancock. There have been a string of articles already criticising her. Yesterday the I published a profile of her on page 3, written by Jane Clinton. While not as devastating as the articles about her by left-wing bloggers and commenters on the web, it nevertheless leaves the reader in absolutely no doubt that she is completely unsuited to her job. It runs

Who is Dido Harding?

She came to prominence during the pandemic when she was put in charge of the NHS Test and Trace in England, which has been widely criticised. The Conservative peer is chair of NHS Improvement and has been appointed the new interim chief of the National Institute for Health Protection following the scrapping of Public Health England. She will lead the search for a permanent successor.

She has made headlines in the past.

She was CEO of TalkTalk when in 2015 it fell victim to a data breach that led to nearly 157,000 people’s personal data being accessed by hackers.  The company was fined £400,000 for “security failings”. During her time at TalkTalk she received two wooden spoon awards, in 2010 and 2011, for poor customer service dished out by the Daily Mail’s Money Mail section. There is a rather sullen photograph of her with one of the wooden spoons – according to the newspaper she would not pose with both “awards”. At the time she admitted that the company’s customer service was “not yet good enough”.

Wasn’t she a friend of David Cameron?

Yes, they were at Oxford together; where she studied politics, philosophy and economics. She was appointed a member of the House of Lords by Mr Cameron in 2014. She held senior roles at Tesco and Sainsbury’s and was made CEO of TalkTalk in 2010. In 2017 she was appointed chair of NHS Improvement. She has also been a jockey and is on the board of the Jockey Club, which owns Cheltenham Racecourse. She is married to the Conservative MP John Penrose, who is on the advisory board of the think-tank 1828, which has published reports calling for Public Health England to be “scrapped”. It has also called for the NHS to be replaced by an insurance system.

Yesterday Mike put up another article tearing into her appointment and the dismantling of Public Health England, which contained a number of searing comments from the good folks on Twitter, Independent SAGE experts and the head of the Nuffield Trust, Nigel Edwards.

For once, Johnson was right – it takes ‘world-beating’ incompetence to screw up the health service mid-pandemic crisis

In a previous article criticising the decision, Mike also reproduces a Tweet from neil flek Waugh, which also shows how corrupt and nepotistic her appointment is.

Matt Hancock’s relationship with Dido Harding is totally corrupt. She raised more than £600,000 for his leadership bid. And as Health Secretary he rewarded her with the position of head of TTT, which failed. He is now scrapping NHS England, and she will head up the new body.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/08/17/public-health-england-to-be-axed-as-matt-hancock-desperately-blame-shifts/

And her appointment wasn’t announced to parliament, but to Policy Exchange, a right-wing think-tank founded by the odious Michael Gove.

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/08/hancock-hails-harding-head-health-honcho.html

Her connection to Cheltenham Racecourse is cause for concern in itself. There were calls earlier this year for the Cheltenham Festival to be cancelled because of the threat of the Coronavirus. It wasn’t, and as a result there was an outbreak in the town. More profit before people.

And does anyone really believe that she does not share her husband’s desire to see the NHS sold off and replaced by an American insurance-driven system, the system that has seen millions of Americans unable to afford proper health care, and going bankrupt and dying because of it?

This is yet another step in the Tory privatisation of the NHS. And Cameron, Johnson, Hancock and Harding are fully behind it.

 

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