Osborne’s ex-spin doctor gets top job at £480m firm
HAVING transformed the public image of former Chancellor George Osborne, Thea Rogers is following her ex- boss into the lucrative corporate world.
While Osborne was paid £380,000 last year for delivering speeches to rich Americans, his erstwhile chief of staff is taking away what is understood to be a six-figure sum as a public relations chief for the restaurant delivery service Deliveroo, which was recently valued at £480 million.
‘With her connections, Thea was never likely to be out of work for long,’ one of her friends tells me.
Glamorous Rogers was credited with encouraging Osborne to adopt a ‘Caesar’ style close- cropped haircut and to slim down on the 5:2 diet, which involves fasting for two days of the week.
She has been given the go-ahead to take the job by the Government’s Advisory Committee on Business Appointments. However, it warned that ‘she should not draw on any privileged information available to her from her time in Crown service’ and she ‘should not become personally involved in lobbying the UK Government on behalf of Deliveroo or its clients’.
Rogers says: ‘Deliveroo is Britain’s best chance at creating a global tech success story.’
Her own story is even more fascinating: Thea’s former boyfriends include Ameetpal Gill, David Cameron’s chief speechwriter-turned-director of strategy. Before being snapped up by Osborne, she was described by one broadsheet newspaper as ‘an intriguing
figure who excites members on both sides of the House’.
One of her other exes is James Purnell, the former Labour Cabinet minister, who is now a senior executive at the BBC. They had an affair while Purnell was on a ‘break’ from his fiancee, documentary maker Lucy Walker.
Rogers was working as a producer on Newsnight at the time of their dalliance, leading to complaints to the BBC that then-presenter Jeremy Paxman had let Purnell get off lightly in an interview.
Purnell later patched up his relationship with Walker, but a few months later it was off again.
Rogers worked her way up to be the BBC’s lead political producer before moving to Downing Street. She is close friends with Sir Craig Oliver, a BBC high-up who went on to be Cameron’s right-hand man.