Ex-jockey is favourite for top role
FORMER jockey Baroness Harding is tipped to take over at the new body replacing Public Health England – run by Duncan Selbie.
Mr Selbie became PHE founding chief executive in 2013.
Before that he was chief executive of Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals and director general of programmes and performance at the NHS – subsequently its first director general of commissioning. One of the highest-paid public servants, Mr Selbie, 57, runs what many see as the embodiment of the nanny state.
In May 2018, he told an NHS conference of the importance of exercise, before claiming £5.90 for a taxi to a station not a mile away.
In 2017, he urged councils and shopping centres to ban CocaCola’s Christmas trucks because of sugar’s role in rotting teeth and making children fat. Dido Harding, 52, was elevated to the House of Lords in 2014 by then Prime Minister David Cameron, a friend since university.
Formerly chief of internet provider TalkTalk, she now runs NHS Track and Trace. She sits on the board of the Jockey Club, organisers of the Cheltenham Festival. It was labelled a “disaster” after claims it accelerated the spread of the coronavirus in March.