‘That’s Shriti Vadera — Gordon’s representative on earth’
Neither do I. So why does this dedicated woman — who is also a director of Oxfam and whose private life, I’m told, has been sacrificed to her work in the manner of Condi Rice — take such a constant kicking? One theory is that it’s Gordon Brown’s fault, for giving so much power to a favoured outsider with a vague job-title (there are other members of his ‘Council of Economic Advisers’ but you’re unlikely to have heard of them), and using her to second-guess officials and ministers, who respond by briefing against her. Add to that elements of sexism — ‘playing the woman not the ball’, as one senior official put it — and perhaps even racism. What most observers agree upon, however, is that Vadera is the victim of her own lack of political sophistication. The columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, also a Ugandan Asian, thinks that’s a natural consequence of her ethnic origin: Asians in Africa, she says, were driven people whose success caused resentment, but who ‘never woke up to the political realities’.
Shriti Vadera will certainly have to wake up to the political realities of life in No. 10. Perhaps I’d better write her some new jokes.
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