Dido, Queen of Carnage, showed us why she keeps getting the top gigs

Madeline Grant

Throughout history, Didos have never had the easiest ride. There’s poor Dido of Carthage of course, left sobbing inconsolably as her faithless beau sails over the horizon. Closer to home, the late Amy Winehouse gave the singer Dido a well-deserved booting, describing her mawkish power ballads as “background music – the background to death”.

So Baroness Harding ought to have known that her grilling in front of the science and technology committee would be a testing experience.

Adding insult to injury, she had the unenviable task of following on from Prof Carl Heneghan of the Oxford Centre for Evidence-based Medicine, who had mounted a powerful case that PCR tests are being used to blow the epidemic out of proportion.

Some have questioned Harding’s stratospheric rise, despite her apparent failure in every major appointment she has held. Harding, you may recall, was CEO of Talktalk during a catastrophic data breach. Since presiding over the dysfunctional test-and-trace system, she has been appointed interim head of a new health agency to replace PHE.

Some have detected in all of this the stamp of the chumocracy; the revolving door of mediocrity and competing interests that propels the wellconnected from failure to failure. Yet when she began to speak I immediately understood why this Queen of Carnage keeps getting these gigs. She has the gift of the gab. By the end, I was all set to award her a promotion myself.

Committee chairman Greg Clark asked why the system had so thoroughly failed to anticipate increased September demand, though more in sorrow than in anger, like a headmaster presiding over a Speech Day with no Oxbridge offers to report.

But he had not reckoned on Baroness Harding. Every inch the Mckinsey graduate, she explained her thinking confidently and concisely, despite the often alarming content of her utterances. Such is the power of Dido that bad news could be converted to mere trifle, like the revelation that estimated demand was “3-4 times” more than the system could handle. As she discussed ramping up capacity in Wales, I felt immediate relief for the people of Newport. When she pledged 500,000 daily tests by the end of October, I had no doubt she would achieve it. Operation Moonshot seemed well on course for a lunar landing. Even when she misidentified the day of the week (“It is only, I think Wednesday today”), it sounded convincing.

When pressed on the system’s failure to predict the September surge, Harding blamed Sage modelling, which had, she said, entirely informed their thinking. Here, even I had a momentary lapse in my Dido-philia. It doesn’t take a Montessori or Mary Poppins to predict a surge of colds as cooped-up children return to school (that’s what children do, they get colds).

But enough criticism – where next for Baroness Harding? My money is on Mistress of the Robes or Head of the Met Police. Or perhaps editor of the Evening Standard.