‘That’s Shriti Vadera — Gordon’s representative on earth’

23 June 2007

The frisson at the mention of her name — and the urge to be nasty about her, neither ‘portly’ nor ‘middle-aged’ being strictly accurate at that time — are typical of Vadera’s treatment by the media, a situation which Westminster reporters say has arisen because, unlike pretty well everyone else in that vicinity, she flatly refuses to talk to them. The Treasury offers no personal details about her, and she is so rarely photographed that some Westminster hacks still can’t pick her out at parties. The picture most often used was snatched through a car window when her house was besieged during the Railtrack row and she refused to come out until the Treasury press office sent the permanent secretary’s limo to rescue her. Bob Kiley, the Transport for London chief whose plans for the Tube were vetoed by an implacable Vadera, has said he once found her weeping in a corridor because the exits were blocked by baying reporters.

Is she really so mysterious? And which is the real Shriti, the dominatrix at the negotiating table or the weeping girl in the corridor? The first question is easier: lazy journalists made her into a woman of mystery because they could not be bothered to do their homework. They also copy each other’s errors: she is often said to have coined the phrase ‘grannies losing their blouses’ in relation to dispossessed Railtrack shareholders (it was actually said by another Treasury official), and she is always described as ‘half Sri Lankan’. In fact, the name Vadera suggests Gujerati or Punjabi ancestry, and her bio from City days indicates that she was born in Uganda, that her family moved in the 1970s first to India then to England, and that she studied politics, philosophy and economics at Somerville College, Oxford, before joining Warburgs in 1984.