Dido Harding

Harding is the daughter of Lord Harding, and the granddaughter of Field Marshal John Harding, 1st Baron Harding of Petherton, who commanded the Desert Rats in World War II.[7]

Raised on the family pig farm in Dorset, she was educated at St Antony's Leweston from 1978–85. She then graduated from the University of Oxford in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, where she studied under Vernon Bogdanor and alongside David Cameron;[2] and then at Harvard Business School, gaining an MBA.[8]

On graduation she joined the management consultancy McKinsey & Company.[9] She went on to work at Kingfisher and Thomas Cook, and then held a variety of senior roles at Tesco.[10] In 2007 she moved to Sainsbury's as convenience store director, and took a seat on the operating board in 2008.[10]

She was named the first CEO of TalkTalk in 2010, when Carphone Warehouse split its telecoms business from its retail operation.[11] She was appointed as a non-executive director on The Court of The Bank of England in July 2014.[10] She has also served on the boards of British Land and Cheltenham Racecourse.[10]

In October 2015, TalkTalk experienced a 'significant and sustained cyber-attack', during which personal and banking details of up to four million customers were thought to have been accessed.[12] City A.M. described her responses as 'naive', noting that early on when asked if the affected customer data was encrypted or not, she replied: 'The awful truth is that I don't know'. Her 'inflexible line' on termination fees was also criticised.[13] Marketing ran a headline, 'TalkTalk boss Dido Harding's utter ignorance is a lesson to us all'.[14] The Evening Standard noted that 'It has been a tough week for TalkTalk boss Dido Harding, facing complaints from customers and calls for her head'.[15] The company admitted the incident had cost it £60 million and lost it 95,000 customers.[16]

In February 2017, Harding announced she would stand down after seven years as CEO of TalkTalk in May 2017, to focus more on her public service activities.[17] In October of that year she was appointed chair of NHS Improvement, which is responsible for overseeing all NHS hospitals, comprising foundation trusts and NHS trusts, as well as independent providers of NHS-funded care.[18] Parliament's Health Select Committee, at that time chaired by former Conservative MP Sarah Wollaston, recommended that Dido resign as a Conservative peer and sit as a crossbench peer in order to 'allow for greater parliamentary and public confidence in her ability to challenge government ministers and policies if this role demands it'. Harding did not accept this.[19]

In January 2018 Harding joined the main board of Jockey Club, which runs many of British horseracing's most popular events, including the Grand National, the Cheltenham Festival and the Derby.[5]

In May 2020, Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced that Harding was to be put in charge of the 'Track, Test and Trace' effort as part of the UK government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.[6]

On 18 June 2020 it was announced by Matt Hancock that the UK government intends to switch from the centralised test and trace model to the decentralised approach pioneered by Apple and Google due to privacy concerns, among other things. Harding will decide on the suitability of the alternative model. She stated that 'What we've done in really rigorously testing both our own COVID-19 app and the Google-Apple version is demonstrate that none of them are working sufficiently well enough to be actually reliable to determine whether any of us should self-isolate for two weeks [and] that's true across the world'. The change was, however, widely interpreted in the press as an abandonment of the UK's app in favour of the Apple-Google one, and a U-turn by the government.[20][21] The BBC also reported that the "latest developments come a day after the BBC revealed that a former Apple executive, Simon Thompson, was taking charge of the late-running project as part of Baroness Harding's team."[20]

In February 2013, she was included in that year's list of the hundred most powerful women in the UK by Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4.[22] The following year, she was named in the ten most influential women in the BBC Woman's Hour Power List 2014.[23]

She was created a Conservative Life Peer on 15 September 2014, taking the title Baroness Harding of Winscombe, of Nether Compton in the County of Dorset.[24][25] She has not rebelled against her party on any of the votes she has attended during her time in the House.[26]

In October 1995, she married John Penrose, who was elected MP for Weston-super-Mare in 2005 and went on to hold junior minister posts from 2010 to 2019.[27] The couple met while working at McKinsey, have two daughters, and live in London during the week and Somerset at the weekend.[28] 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'.[29]

Harding is a horse racing enthusiast and member of the Jockey Club, joining the main board in January 2018.[5] In 1993 she borrowed £7,000 from her bank to buy an Irish thoroughbred to ride in ladies' point-to-point races. In 1998, her horse Cool Dawn won the Cheltenham Gold Cup.[30][31] Harding rode Cool Dawn herself for three seasons, achieving second place in the 1996 Foxhunter Chase on the Cheltenham course.[32]

• Harding, Dido (8 March 1999). Cool Dawn: My National Velvet. Mainstream Publishing. ISBN 1-84018-179-6.