Venture capitalist’s daughter knew that her mother was the right woman for the job

As the architect of Britain’s hugely successful vaccine programme, Kate Bingham may one day look back on how she accepted the job with more than a little bemusement.

When Boris Johnson approached the biotech venture capitalist last year, she is said to have been forthright. “I’m not a vaccine expert. Why should I be the right person?” she apparently said.

She later admitted that without her grown-up daughter remonstrating with her, she may have persisted in her refusal to believe she was the right woman for the job.

“When I told my daughter I wasn’t sure if I could do this, she looked at me and said, ‘Mum! If I’d said that you’d have given me all this lip about, don’t be under-confident, you’re just putting yourself down!’ So, I was told off by my 22-year-old daughter.” Since agreeing last summer to lead the UK’s vaccine task force, more than 66 million vaccines have been administered, and the number of approved drugs is steadily rising.

Having been credited with saving the country from disaster, it should come as little surprise that the 55-year-old mother of three is to be honoured for her services.

Born in London in 1965, the eldest of three children to the late Lord Bingham of Cornhill, the hugely respected lawyer, she attended St Paul’s Girls’ School in west London, gained a first in biochemistry at Oxford then went to Harvard Business School.

She took great pleasure in transforming “dry science” into “something real”, an academic pursuit ideally suited to her next move into the competitive world of biotech investments. She worked at the US company Vertex Pharmaceuticals and then Schroder Ventures Life Sciences, becoming a managing partner at SV Health Investors, a life sciences venture capital company.

Since stepping back from her SV role, she has enjoyed great success as the head of the vaccine task force. However, she was buffeted by some minor controversies.

Her appointment triggered claims of a “chumocracy” – her husband is Jesse Norman, the Conservative MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire, who is Financial Secretary to the Treasury.

It then emerged that she had brought in eight full-time PR consultants, costing the taxpayer £670,000. Others said her appointment was inappropriate because she was not a vaccine expert.

Now, her damehood will prove alongside the millions of jabbed arms that her daughter was spot on – she was the right woman for the job.