Dido Harding - should she be given greater responsibilities?

[Mumratheevergiving]

So the Government are busy blaming Public Health England and Ofqual for the recent disastrous handling of health and education (despite these being agencies they created, instructed and oversee!) They are now ditching PHE and have given the job of heading up the replacement agency ‘National Institute for Health Protection’ to Dido Harding the conservative peer who is currently heading up the utter shambles that is our track and trace system

So:
YABU Dido Harding is the right person for the job, we’re in safe hands with her at the helm

YANBU Dido Harding’s appointment is political cronyism and her track record is not good enough

Bit of background reading on Dido’s previous work history www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/meet-the-naive-ignorant-tory-peer-running-govts-testing-programme/21/05/%3famp

It's absolutely fucking shameless. It should not have been offered to her and if she had even a modicum of decency she would refuse to take it. No wonder Boris has fucked off camping, he's hiding from this and the exam shambles.

there is no sensible reason for wanting to pull apart PHE in the middle of a crisis. It was SERCOs private test-and-trace that failed, but now they are giving them more power. crazy.

This is a proper Conservative government.

Don't forget she was in charge of Talk Talk, when they had their massive data breach 😳🤦🏽‍♀️

You forgot to mention married to a Tory MP.

.... I’m a 3rd world country we would be accusing them of rampant corruption.

That should be in a 3rd world county!

Try reframing it in literally any other professional context to understans just how utterly indefensible this appointment is. Dido is given a big project to lead despite having no field-relevant experience or expertise. She leaves it too late to heed the technical advice of experts in the field and as a result everything has to be scrapped and restarted at both great cost and increased risk to public health. The consequence of this for Dido is being given the lead on a larger, longer-term project with more responsibility and a bigger budget. In real life, when you fuck up at work that doesn't happen. The best case scenario is you keep your position but with extra checks etc. on your performance.

The current head of Public Health England has a 40 year career in public health. I mean... just jesus fucking christ.
www.gov.uk/government/people/duncan-selbie

If the one voter MattHancock who thinks she should be given the role would like to tell us why I'm all ears!

The person responsible for one of the biggest data breaches (and who blithely muttered about it being "ancient history" as well as lying about the severity of the attack) this country has ever seen has now been handed control of how many people's medical data?

Yeah, nobody's going to use the new system, nobody's going to hand over their details and nobody likes a bullshitter like Dido.

YADNBU - sorry not got voting!

She is a disaster.
The government needs to get Meg Williams back from Singapore to sort things out.

This is in stark contrast to the active thread I've just seen where a 16 year old has been invited to a meeting for a 'disciplinary for gross negligence, in regards to care of customers'

Duncan Selbie is a good, honourable chap.
Dido Harding profited from Cheltenham.

PHE do some fabulous work.
She oversaw the screw up of track and trace.

It’s corruption. Blatant corruption. Her appointment announcement before there’s even a new body and without even pretending to have any sort of recruitment process. Married to Tory MP who supports replacing NHS with insurance.

Another very wealthy (salary 6.8 million in 2014) A Cameron croney with no concept of the lives or ordinary people.

Her and Chris Grayling. Both building careers out of failing upwards. It's disgraceful.

Married to a Tory MP who supports an insurance led health system. And get this, he is the Anti-CORRUPTION Lead. OMFG. Private Eye will be having a field day.

@positivepixie

Married to a Tory MP who supports an insurance led health system. And get this, he is the Anti-CORRUPTION Lead. OMFG. Private Eye will be having a field day.

Well isn't that just the cherry on the cake.

Shameless was the right word for this lot.

I saw a comment on Twitter that read 'I wouldn't trust her to run a bath' and that sums up my feelings on it too.

I am so fucking infuriated. Another CV for comparison, this time the head of the equivalent German body. Doctorate in the transmission of infectious disease between humans and animals, 30 years of relevant experience.

I mean ffs what are they thinking? That running a for-profit telecomms company (badly) is the same as running a supposedly politically neutral organisation tasked with the complex task of preventing and controlling the spread of infectious disease? We need the highest level of knowledge and competency here not "some woman I went to uni with".

twitter.com/GeorgePeretzQC/status/1295448536465788933

I am thinking of writing to my MP again, as I feel as unhappy about this as I did about Dominic Cummings' eye test.

It's a bloody disgrace. “ Penrose sits on the advisory board of think tank '1828', which 'calls for the NHS to be replaced by an insurance system and for Public Health England to be scrapped'”

Penrose is Dido Harding's husband and so they have had their reward.

Ugh

This whole track and trace fiasco has been used and capitalised on as an opportunity to destroy the network of PHE and replace it with a centralised thing that they control.

For a Tory bunch that should n theory hate big government and over centralisation and control, Johnson and Cummings are the complete opposite. They want to tear up every institution that works at a localised level, with people empowered to make recommendations for their area, and replace it with something centralised that can be controlled to provide the vanity metrics and numbers they need to spin back a story to the people.

They must have been terrified by PHE's potential to control the narrative around coronavirus success if they had been allowed to test and trace locally. So instead they ignored them, then stifled them, then co-opted them at the last minute with the sole intent of giving them enough power to them point to them as failures at the very end, so that they could introduce their Trojan horse, formalise the involvement of private sector agencies, and place "their person" at the head of it all.

None of tbis serves the public interest. All of it serves their interest.

@napmeistergeneral

It's absolutely fucking shameless. It should not have been offered to her and if she had even a modicum of decency she would refuse to take it. No wonder Boris has fucked off camping, he's hiding from this and the exam shambles.

This.

The middle of a pandemic is the ideal time to rearrange your public health structures

How could it possibly be otherwise......