... AND LABOUR MONEY MAN WHO BECAME CHARITY’S TREASURER

A FORMER adviser to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, David Pitt-Watson, 58 — Oxfam’s honorary treasurer since 2011 — was finance director of the Labour Party from 1997 to 1999.

He was offered the post of Labour general secretary in 2008 but decided not to take it — to the disappointment of Brown, then PM.

The City fund manager’s influence at Oxfam — along with his links to the Labour Party — may partly explain why the charity has become highly politicised and veered dramatically to the Left.

In 2014, Oxfam was criticised for a faux film poster showing a broiling sea under clouds titled: The Perfect Storm. Added were the words ‘starring zero-hours contracts, high prices, benefit cuts, unemployment, childcare costs’.

A message above read: ‘Lifting the lid on austerity Britain reveals a perfect storm — and it’s forcing more and more people into poverty.’

Meanwhile, on Twitter Oxfam invited people to hear how ‘we investigate the reasons why so many people are turning to food banks in Britain 2014’.

Pitt-Watson (pictured), also an executive fellow at London Business School, was chairman of the United Nations environment programme’s finance initiative in the run-up to the Paris Climate summit.

The son of a cleric his grandfather was moderator of the Church of Scotland in the Fifties. He has written a number of books and pamphlets but denies he’s a member of an ivory-towered elite.

‘I have never understood the notion that there is a divorce between the real world and the academic world,’ he says.

‘I don’t get it. The academic world is there reflecting, explaining, understanding the real world.’