Fat-cat sisterhood that runs Britain – badly
Any updated version of Anatomy of Britain, the famous book by Anthony Sampson analysing the networks of power and influence which ran Britain back in the Sixties, would have to include a section devoted to the role played by a certain set of women. Lin Homer, for instance, who has just resigned, with a £2 million pension pot, from her lamentable performance as head of HMRC, was dubbed “Dame Disaster” after her repeated failures at the head of other public bodies.
The politically correct Moira Wallace, provost of Oriel College, Oxford, after being the top civil servant in the Department of Energy and Climate Change, now finds herself put on the spot by the row over demands that Oriel should remove the statue of its benefactor Cecil Rhodes.
Dame Helen Ghosh was formerly top civil servant at the Environment department, where she was in post during the later stages of the farm payments fiasco, which cost us £600 million in EU fines, and helped push through the Climate Change Act. Today, as head of the National Trust, she claims that her greatest challenge is the damage done to Trust properties by global warming.
Then there is Deirdre Hutton, dubbed “Queen of the Quangos”, who earns £100,000 a year for two days a week as chair of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) after previously heading the Food Standards Agency and the National Consumer Council. She is still in post despite the CAA closing down Britain’s airports in the 2010 “volcanic ash” debacle, which cost airlines £2 billion, although it later emerged that the ash had posed no threat to airliners at all.
When I commented then on the ease with which certain women move effortlessly from one wellrewarded top post to another, my column was headed “The more we pay them, the less we get”. But have no fear. As we saw from the dismal performance of Sir Philip Dilley as head of the Environment Agency, this applies equally to many of their male equivalents. I can only repeat my observation that there are still a great many good people in this country. The only problem is that none of them are running it.