Without a trace: Baroness Dido Harding to step down as chair of NHS Improvement Baroness Dido "Queen of Carnage" Harding will step down from her role as NHS Improvement chair in October. The news, first broken by HSJ, comes two months after Harding applied, without success, to be the new NHS England boss – a role taken up by Amanda Pritchard as of 1 August. The Conservative Party life peer had been chair …
You can pretend to do a good job, eventually the mask slips and your on your way out with the cardboard box and pot plant.
This is a classic case of overpayment and underperformance with a healthy dose of nepotism.
There is a god in heaven after all! Dido Harding should go back to the lords and repent for her sins against the people of this country.
I'm off down the pub for a celebratory pint, anyone care to join me.
!Ding-dong! The Witch is dead
Which old Witch? The Wicked Witch!
Ding-dong! The Wicked Witch is dead
Wake up you sleepy head, rub your eyes, get out of bed
Wake up, the Wicked Witch is dead
She's gone where the goblins go
Below, below, below
Yo-ho, let's open up and sing and ring the bells out
Ding-dong's the merry-oh, sing it high, sing it low
Let them know the Wicked Witch is dead!
"You can pretend to do a good job, eventually the mask slips and your on your way out with the cardboard box and pot plant."
Sadly, I've found this to rarely be the case. Far more common for them to move on to a newer and greater role once they've *almost* been found out (as she seems to have done multiple times before). Most people get to retirement before getting found out, and to be fair this isn't the end of the line for her - I suspect she'll just end up in another senior role. Plus she's a life peer - she's already on board the gravy train for life. Maybe the Cabinet Office's Anti-Corruption Champion can ensure she doesn't get another government role, but given she shares a bed with that guy, I doubt it.
That reminds me of:-
A male Tory MP married a Labour MP ...Unfortunately on their wedding night they had a major argument about politics and got into bed back to back. After a while his wife said “ darling, there’s a split in the Labour Party and if the Tory member would like to stand he’d have a very good chance of getting in” “ too late “ he replied, “ the Tory member has stood as an independent and lost his deposit.”
Once horsey-set member Matt Hancock was found with his trousers down, Harding lost the person who had endlessly promoted her towards her level of incompetence. Had he stayed in his post, she would have been a shoo-in for the top job at the NHS.
Still, now she can spend more time with hubby, John Penrose, the Prime Minister's anti-corruption champion...
I think that depends on what you mean by incompetence or competence at the job.
Ability to run Covid-19 Test and Trace effectively to support the strategy to reduce infections and deaths to an absolute minimum - incompetent. (the SAGE described the effect of Test and Trace on reducing the level of infection last October as having only a "marginal impact" https://www.ft.com/content/acf4d4f8-5a99-4e65-9af4-ca229a519eb7)
Ability to brazenly defend the indefensible, make claims wholly unsubstantiated by the facts and reality and promote yourself as 'the best person for the job' while being completely loyal to the people who put you in post - highly competent.
Joke alert icon because, well, 'many a true word spoken in jest'.
"Harding lost the person who had endlessly promoted her towards her level of incompetence"
Don't bet on Harding being her only champion. She's an Oxford PPE (with Dave and Boris) and Tory apparatchik and will get parachuted into another trough with a political agenda before the year is out.
Public schools were originally indeed public - they were founded for the education of the "deserving sons of the poor". However, just like salmon (originally a food of the poor for the catching) they got taken over by the rich and rendered "exclusive" some time around the late C18 with the rise of the new mercantile rich.
My guess is that the relevant papers (if they exist) will be embargoed for 30 to 100 years, and that anyone who should be held to account will be dead or otherwise beyond justice by the time the truth comes out.
Any inquiry in the next few years will be dominated by people anxious not to rock the boat, or damage their chances of promotion or just holding on to their jobs. Irrespective of the integrity of whichever judge* actually chairs the inquiry the people giving evidence will have their own backs to guard, and I just cannot believe that Baroness Harding will suddenly come over all contrite and apologetic all of a sudden.
*Why is it that judges and lawyers always get these gigs? Scientists are just as good, if not better at asking questions, are interested in the facts, and not part of a profession which is steeped in the culture that it is the quality of the argument that matters, rather than the truth. Personally I'd have the inquiry led by someone like Sir Paul Nurse who actually understands the science and statistics
Quote
"*"
Thats an easy one to answer, judges and lawyers have their way of obscuring the truth behind 17 layers of legalese, plus stringing the whole thing out by 5 yrs, and giving just enough evidence to clear the client of any major wrong doing.
Whereas science and engineering types need to be at their jobs because society needs them doing their job rather than listening to politicians waffle on about how its all wasnt their fault
Read up on the 'Pournelle' theory of government services....
...have stuck to making records.
What? Wrong Dido? Oh well, I suppose this one has made some "records" of a different sort - such as wasting the most amount of other people's money in the shortest possible time. Then again, that applies to most of the idiots she knows, so maybe even that's not a record.
Gotta keep that money being hosed towards those with already deep pockets. If they haven't been set up for a life of carefree wealth already, then the scheme would have to be judged a failure by the likes of those in charge.
The amounts that have been wasted and misdirected here without oversight are a true scandal, but I doubt that we've heard her name for the last time when more vacancies at the money trough become available in the future.
Amazing what you can get away with whilst you distract the public with unimportant culture war circuses.
I'm glad Dido Harding will not be head of the NHS. Her husband has been linked in the media to a right-wing group calling for the NHS to be replaced by an insurance system – scrapping the NHS in favour of a system where people pay for insurance either through private firms or a government scheme.
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