The dastardly Mr Deedes's Big shot of the week
ON Whitehall they called her ‘ The Shriek’. As Gordon Brown’s most trusted adviser, hot-breathed Shriti Vadera’s volcanic eruptions were legendary.
The power- dressing former business minister stands barely 5 ft 2 in her Louboutins, but don’t let her diminutive frame nor gentle, dowager-like tones fool you.
During her ten years in government, Shriti, 55, terrified junior staff, reduced experienced civil servants to nervous wrecks and even tore strips off a quivering Tony Blair.
True, she could be a handful. But speak to any of the senior figures involved in the banking crisis, and they’ll tell you the bawling Baroness was one the few people in government who actually got things done. Asked how he kept nuisance bankers in line, former chancellor Alistair Darling explained: ‘You put them in a room with Shriti and lock the doors for a couple of hours.’
Her stewardship during this period was rewarded with the chairmanship of Santander UK.
HER £650,000-a-year role is under scrutiny after her chief executive Nathan Bostock was recently revealed to have overseen royal Bank of Scotland’s Global restructuring Group, an odious business support unit said to have driven numerous small businesses into the ground. Some feel Shriti should give him the heave-ho. For now, she insists Bostock is the right man for the job, though I dare say a few terse words have been handed down in private.
Her steeliness was forged during her first career at UBS Warburg. Ploughing a furrow through in the City during the 1980s amidst all the red braces and old school ties required thick skin. She thrived, thanks to sharp elbows and an exhaustive work ethic.
Her parents were wealthy. Born in Uganda, where her grandfather arrived from India in 1910 and became a successful entrepreneur, the Vaderas owned a tea plantation until Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians forced them to flee when she was just ten.
She was sent to an english private school before winning a place at Oxford. Contemporaries recall her hanging around with a rather bitchy crowd ‘which enjoyed rubbishing everything’. It is said wellto-do Shriti would loftily boast she only wore silk undergarments.
After 14 years in the sink-or-swim world of investment banking, Gordon Brown lured her to the Treasury where she took on a number of high-profile assignments, including handling the partial privatisation of London Underground.
When Brown entered Downing Street, it was assumed Shriti would follow him there, but cabinet secretary Gus O’Donnell wouldn’t have it. Word was the Sir Humphrys were, by then, too rattled to work with her.
Instead she was ennobled Baroness Vadera of Holland Park and sent to be a minister at International Development. She was moved to Peter Mandelson’s Business Department six months later before taking a key position in the Cabinet Office during the financial crisis. After a tumultuous year cracking skulls and drafting the banking industry’s rescue package, she departed for a job at the G20.
AS well as her Santander berth, she has beefy directorships with BHP Billiton and Astrazeneca. Bit of a workaholic is Shriti. She’s said to have once rolled up at Downing Street at 5am demanding to discuss a pressing economic matter with Gordon Brown when the PM was still in his pyjamas.
As such, there’s not much to report on the personal front. Her brother rupin, 58, is boss of City firm First International Investments. She has never married.
She prefers to avoid the limelight, which is just as well. A say-it-asshe-sees it type of person, she’s a bit of a public relations nightmare. During a rare TV interview during the 2009 recession, a tactless observation that she was seeing ‘some green shoots of recovery’ sent Labour’s hitherto well-oiled press machine into meltdown.
Formidable, forthright, tough-as-boot leather. All of the above. But perhaps it is also worth noting former Transport Minister Stephen Byers once observed: ‘She can be forceful but sometimes she can be a real sweetie.’