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Boris Johnson has been accused by a former Labor chancellor of corrupting the constitution by appointing fellow Conservative Dido Harding to powerful twin civil service roles in the fight against Covid-19.
Lord Falconer, who is also a former Attorney General, spoke out when his party leader in the House of Lords, Baroness Angela Smith wrote to the new cabinet secretary, Simon Case, asking for urgent clarification of what appeared to be a clear violation of public function. code.
Harding, former CEO of the telecommunications group TalkTalk, is currently the director of the much-criticized NHS test and trace, and was recently appointed to head the new National Institute for Health Protection (NIHP).
In both roles, Labor says that she works as a civil servant and, therefore, is covered by the civil service code, which states that civil servants must not “act in a manner determined by political considerations.”
But Harding sits down as a backup Tory peer and takes the conservative whip, operating there in a political capacity. As recently as last week, he voted in line with his party on the agriculture bill in the upper house.
Lord Falconer said that he had never known of anyone who was allowed to mix public service and political roles like that, in the Commons or in the Lords, and demanded that she sit down as a non-aligned cross-banking partner, or to be appointed by the prime minister as a government minister. As a result, she could be held accountable and answer questions in the upper house.
Falconer told the Observer: “It is gross corruption of our constitution to turn a Conservative deputy in parliament into a top official without any process and without even requiring the most basic rules of political fairness.
“It’s no wonder our track and trace system goes so bad if your talent pool is limited to Conservative MPs in parliament.”
Government sources said that Harding had proven himself responsible and had appeared before the science and technology selection committee last week to answer questions about the Covid-19 testing system he administers.
Last month, Health Secretary Matt Hancock defended his appointment as NIHP director, following the controversial decision to remove Public Health England (PHE).
The appointment came as a surprise, however, because of the NHS ‘poor test-and-trace performance, which she has run since May, and because Harding was an active conservative in the Lords.
The removal of PHE also sparked a chorus of criticism that the Boris Johnson administration was trying to lay the blame for its own failures during the pandemic.
The 52-year-old Lady Harding has been a Conservative member of the House of Lords since her friend David Cameron, the then Prime Minister, awarded her a life title in 2014.
Dr Chaand Nagpaul, head of the British Medical Association, warned at the time her appointment was announced in August that the public health body should be free of any political influence that could hamper its work. “The BMA strongly believes that the nation’s public health medicine service must be truly public, [and] completely independent of political influence, ”he said.
“It must be able to operate with full transparency to advise the government, inform the public and do its job, which is so vital to the health of the nation.”
