Baroness who thinks she knows better than voters
SHE was not the only Remainer to throw a party on EU referendum night, but how particularly flat the atmosphere must have fallen for Baroness Wheatcroft at her £1.5million Westminster home.
‘She was expecting it to be a celebration, but it really must have been pretty miserable,’ said one House of Lords source yesterday.
The Tory peer had nailed her colours firmly to the mast as a cheerleader for the moneyed Metropolitan elite.
Before the vote, Baroness Wheatcroft, 6 , wrote in the Evening Standard: ‘The statistics … all point in the same direction – being part of the single market brings financial benefits to Britain.’
Despite the majority of Britons voting to leave the EU, the Baroness – a lifelong Tory who embraced the Cameron regime – appears intent on doing all she can to derail Brexit. Yesterday she publicly discussed options to ‘revisit’ the referendum result.
So who is Baroness Wheatcroft, of Blackheath in the London Borough of Green- wich, to use the full title she acquired in 2010?
Born Patience Jane Wheatcroft in Chesterfield, she was educated at Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Tamworth and the College of Technology, Chesterfield.
She graduated from the University of Birmingham with a degree in law, but pursued a highly successful career in journalism instead.
The mother of three lists her recreations in Who’s Who as skiing, opera and theatre.
The House of Lords register of interests shows she is a non-executive director of car manufacturer Fiat Chrysler, for which she received an annual fee and ‘other compensation’ worth a total of £171,655 last year, according to the firm’s annual report.
She is a non-executive director of wealth management firm St James’s Place, for which she received a salary and fees of £58,200 and benefits of £1,788 last year, according to its annual report.
Beginning as a City reporter on the Daily Mail in the mid1970s, she moved to the Sunday Times and then the Times, as deputy City Editor. She was later deputy City Editor of the Mail on Sunday, then Business and City Editor of The Times, where former colleagues remember her as a confidante of Rupert Murdoch.
She became Editor of the Sunday Telegraph in 2006 resigning 18 months later, before made Editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe in 2009. She stood down when she was made a peer.