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

23 June 2007

There she absorbed the firm’s 14-hours-a-day work ethic and its dislike of personalised publicity. But a former colleague says she was ‘not a classic Warburgs team player’: very focused on her own agenda, she specialised in debt-restructuring for poor African countries and privatisation work in South Africa, where in the early 1990s she had urged the bank to become an adviser to Nelson Mandela’s ANC, which it declined to do. After Mandela’s accession, she led Warburgs’ work on telecoms and transport privatisations, despite opposition from within the socialist ANC itself. It was her willingness to drive private-sector solutions to achieve socialist objectives — plus her tenacity and technical competence — that recommended Vadera to Brown. She became his chief negotiator with the City and the business community, some of whom resented her manner. David Gunn, who joined Kiley’s team after running US and Canadian mass-transit systems, received a lecture on how to buy rolling-stock: ‘Who the hell are you to tell me?’ he yelled at her. ‘Have you ever bought a subway car?’

Many investors will also never forgive her for the confiscation of Railtrack. But the City generally recognises her as one of its own — a financier trained to master detail and negotiate to the last full stop, rather than to seek Civil Service compromise. The veteran banker Marcus Agius, now chairman of Barclays, told me, ‘She applies merchant-banking methods in a Whitehall context, by which I mean that she helps make difficult things happen for a very important client.’ If businesspeople are wary of her (‘she’s dangerous,’ said one), it’s because they are fundamentally wary of her boss. At a personal level, by contrast, most were complimentary. Michael Klein, vice chairman of Citigroup, which operates in 100 countries, said, ‘I can say without exaggeration that she is one of the most competent public officials I’ve come across anywhere.’ National Grid chairman Sir John Parker said simply, ‘I think the country needs people like her.’ Paul Myners, a very senior figure in the investment world, added, ‘I don’t actually recognise the person I sometimes read about in the press.’