BLUESTOCKING REEKING OF THE ESTABLISHMENT
ASKED why she was not drawn to politics or law as a career, Charlotte Hogg once said: ‘You can have too much of a good thing in one family.’ She wasn’t joking. For the mother-of two who is – for the moment, at least – the most senior woman at the Bank of England is also a scion of one of the country’s most blue-blooded dynasties, its members at the very heart of the establishment for nearly a century.
So well-heeled are they that after Prince George’s birth in 2013, the society magazine Tatler included Miss Hogg’s niece Cicely Sarah Rose Hogg, then not yet a year old, in a list of candidates who might one day make a suitable wife for the future king.
Cicely is the daughter of Miss Hogg’s brother Quintin, 43 – her only sibling, whom she failed to disclose works at Barclays when she was promoted to deputy governor for markets and banking at the Bank of England – and his wife Elizabeth, 36, chief financial officer at the upmarket restaurant Corbin & King, whose swish London eateries The Wolseley and The Delaunay are favourites with business high rollers.
This is not to say every member of 46-year-old Miss Hogg’s family has always bathed themselves in glory. Having practised as a barrister, her Eton and Oxfordeducated father Douglas, 72, the 3rd Viscount Hailsham QC, was a cabinet minister in John Major’s government, where he came in for heavy criticism while serving as agriculture secretary during the mad cow disease crisis.
But he is perhaps more remembered for hitting the headlines during the MPs’ expenses scandal in 2009 when it was alleged he claimed £2,200 for the cleaning of the moat around Kettlethorpe Hall, his country estate in Lincolnshire. The then Tory MP said he had never asked to be reimbursed for the cost of cleaning the moat, but accepted it had not been ‘positively excluded’ from paperwork submitted to the Commons fees office and agreed to repay £2,200 ‘in recognition of the public concern over this issue’.
He was first elected as an MP in 1979 in the seat of Grantham, then boundary changes moved him to Sleaford and North Hykeham. He stood down as an MP at the 2010 general election.
He had inherited the title of Viscount Hailsham from his father, another former senior Tory, Quintin Hogg, who was the longest-serving Lord Chancellor of the 20th century, holding the position in both Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher’s governments. He died aged 94 in 2001.
Before them came the 1st Viscount Hailsham, also Douglas Hogg, who held the position of Lord Chancellor in Stanley Baldwin’s government in the 1920s and 1930s.
The Lord Chancellor traditionally served as head of the judiciary, but the post’s role was redefined in 2006 when most of its judicial functions were transferred to the Lord Chief Justice.
Miss Hogg’s mother Sarah, an economist, has a formidable background too. Having run 10 Downing Street’s policy unit under Mr Major, she was awarded a life peerage in her own right, making her Baroness Hogg.
Baroness Hogg, 70, became the first female chairman of a FTSE 100 company when she took up the position at the venture capitalists 3i in 2002. She has also been a governor of the BBC and is a non-executive director of John Lewis.
Her father, John Boyd-Carpenter, who was appointed a life peer in 1972 as Baron BoydCarpenter, and her grandfather, Sir Archibald Boyd-Carpenter, were both Conservative MPs and treasury ministers.
After Miss Hogg appeared before the Treasury select committee at a confirmation hearing for a new deputy governor of the Bank of England recently, MP Jacob Rees-Mogg revealed he had, as an Eton schoolboy, invited her maternal grandfa- ther, Baron Boyd-Carpenter, to address students in Greek.
The committee’s chairman Andrew Tyrie, meanwhile, remarked, in relation to her paternal grandfather Quintin, before a hearing: ‘I have over the years got used to doing business with people who are the sons and daughters of people I used to work with. But I think it’s a first where I can say that I used to have lunch with your grandfather in the members’ dining room.’
Miss Hogg, a keen horsewoman who has taken part in high-profile eventing championships, is married to Steve Sacks, 50, chief customer officer of Burberry and chairman of the English National Ballet School. He was formerly director of customer strategy and insight at Lloyds Banking Group. The couple own a house estimated to be worth £4.7million in Fulham, south west London.
MISS Hogg was educated at £35,000a-year St Mary’s School Ascot, then studied at the University of Oxford and Harvard before joining the Bank of England as a graduate trainee in 1992. She worked for the management consultancy McKinsey, the investment bank Morgan Stanley, the business data firm Experian and the Spanish-owned lender Santander – where she is said to have been well known for her biker-style leather jackets – before returning to the Bank in 2013 as its first chief operating officer.
Miss Hogg’s aunt Dame Mary Hogg, 70, younger sister of her father, is a former High Court judge. She faced fury last year after it was revealed she handed a child back to her abusive father despite warnings from medical and social workers.
In a 2012 judgment, Dame Mary declared Ben Butler had been ‘wronged by the system’. But Butler, 36, was then convicted of murdering and abusing his daughter Ellie, six, and jailed for a minimum of 23 years. Dame Mary retired a week before Butler’s two-month criminal trial at the Old Bailey.