At first glance, it looked like very good news when David Cameron appointed Justine Greening as Secretary of State for International Development in his September 2012 reshuffle. Greening is an experienced accountant, an alumna of Price Waterhouse Cooper, GlaxoSmithKline and Centrica, with zero tolerance for waste.
She already proved herself an advocate of fiscal retrenchment in her first government post, as Economic Secretary to the Treasury, setting out the government’s case with clarity and zest. ‘There was a time when the Labour party had something relevant to say on the economy,’ she declared to the House of Commons. ‘That time has now passed.’
So when she told last year’s Tory party conference that she was going to examine her department’s expenditure ‘line by line’, she deserved to be taken seriously — and after only a few months she proved to be a woman of her word.
First, to the consternation of many an NGO director, she reached an agreement with the Indian government to phase out Britain’s aid programme there by 2015.
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