Scottish Daily Mail

Bigshot of the week

- BARBARA JUDGE CHAIRMAN, INSTITUTE OF DIRECTORS

THE occasional Saturday column in which our scabrous diarist profiles City movers and shakers in the news...

THE Institute of Directors’ Regency-style HQ is a starchy, solemn sort of place. All sweeping staircases and gilt-edged portraits, it is sandwiched neatly among the private clubs of Pall Mall, where elderly gents sip tepid pink gins and grumble about the bygone days of empire.

So imagine the panicked snorts and frantic paper shuffling when kitten-heeled Barbara Judge, 69, came click-clacking across the stuffy institute’s marble hallway for the first time last year.

The alabaster skin, the immaculate platinum blonde bun, those piercing peepers – her presence alone looks as though it could send the mercury plummeting several notches.

And that quirky style. All those ruffle-necked tunic shirts and brassbutto­ned blazers – she’s part sexy fräulein, part sniffy dressage mistress. All that’s absent is a riding crop clasped in her mitt.

A pity. Plenty of naughty executives out there who could use a good thrashing.

Barbara – or Lady Judge as she styles herself – is the 112-year-old business body’s first female chairman, and an American one to boot.

She caused uproar earlier this month by suggesting new mothers risked their careers by taking long periods of maternity leave. ‘I know it’s counter-cultural but I think long maternity breaks are bad for women,’ she said in a speech to the Wealth Management Associatio­n’s Women In Wealth Forum.

Ballbreake­r? Assertive, certainly. Ice maiden? Hmmm, perhaps. Though many who meet her say she’s actually warmer than her frosty, wraithlike exterior suggests.

But the extraordin­ary thing about New York-born Lady Judge is not her outspoken remarks or even her eccentric appearance, but rather how she came to now be widely known as ‘London’s best connected woman’.

Flick over to her Who’s Who entry and it’s more impressive than that of a retired field marshal, listing numerous high-flying jobs, charity posts and more non-exec appointmen­ts than a spivvy ex-Cabinet minister on the make.

So who is this networker par excellence, and how has a former litigator from a modest village on Long Island found herself at the very pinnacle of the City establishm­ent?

Her mentor was not her entreprene­ur father but her mother Marcia, a university dean, who worked right up until she was 87. To this day, spry Babs maintains a burning wish to die working at a desk.

It was her mother who put paid to Judge’s early ambitions to be on the stage, redirectin­g her towards law. ‘If you want to act,’ she advised, ‘go act in front of a jury.’

After working in corporate law in New York for a number of years, she was summoned to President Carter’s White House to become the youngest ever commission­er of the Securities and Exchange Commission – an event she says ‘changed my life’.

Following her marriage to American lawyer Allen Thomas, she moved to Hong Kong in the early 1980s, landing a senior post at the British merchant bank Samuel Montagu as its first female director (lots of firsts on Judge’s CV). She headed for London in 1994 in order to send her son Lloyd to Eton, and worked for numerous private equity firms.

Having split with Thomas, she married again in 2002 to City granMORGAN dee and multi-millionair­e Conservati­ve Party donor Sir Paul Judge.

Since then, Lady Judge has been spreading her patronage like an upwardly mobile Renaissanc­e-era cardinal. She’s been chairman of the Pension Protection Fund, deputy chairman of Friends Provident and of the corporate governance watchdog the Financial Reporting Council, governor of the School of Oriental and African Studies and a trustee of the Royal Academy and the Wallace Collection. The list of plum appointmen­ts is truly exhausting.

EYEBROWS were raised in 2004 when she landed a £60,000 job working two days a week as head of the uK Atomic Energy Authority, despite no previous experience in the sector.

There were catty accusation­s she’d secured the post thank to a pal on the selection panel. The lecherous soaks at Private Eye dubbed her ‘The Atomic Kitten’.

Away from the treadmill of work, she and her husband live in a splendid Thames-side flat big enough to entertain 300 guests at a time. They also own a home in the South of France. Peculiarly for someone so trim, Judge is a dedicated gourmand, writing restaurant reviews for wealth bible Forbes, though she admits she fastidious­ly weighs herself day and night to maintain her wafer-thin physique.

Last month, the IoD’s high-profile director-general, Simon Walker, departed, replaced by constructi­on boss Stephen Martin. Thus far, we’re yet to hear a peep out of the wonkish young shaver. Significan­t? Perhaps.

I have a feeling the redoubtabl­e Lady J is keen to wear the trousers around those grandiose Pall Mall offices these days.

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