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

Margaret Thatcher’s speechwriters always struggled to get her to do the jokes. I once had a similar problem with Shriti Vadera, the former banker who will next week become, arguably, the most powerful woman with a paid job in Downing Street since Lady Thatcher’s departure.

Miss Vadera is Gordon Brown’s most trusted policy adviser and Whitehall enforcer. Next week she is expected to move from the Treasury to take up a key role in the kitchen cabinet at No. 10, perhaps even as the new Prime Minister’s senior ‘gatekeeper’. When I was briefly her speech-writer, however, she was a director of Warburg Dillon Read (now UBS Investment Bank) in the City. It was 1998, and we were at a conference on globalisation. She had agreed at short notice to speak about the impact on the developing world of that year’s Asian and Russian market crises. She asked me to help and — this being the morning after a lively night before — I suggested a joke to lighten the mood. Perhaps it wasn’t a very good joke: when she delivered it with a hesitant frown it raised barely a titter until she added, mock-crossly, ‘That was Martin’s. I told him it wouldn’t work,’ which at least got half a laugh.

I tell this story to establish that I have a distant personal connection with my subject and a certain fixed idea of her. I have not seen her since shortly after she disappeared behind the Treasury purdah screen in 1999 to advise ministers on ‘public private partnerships, the Private Finance Initiative and other business issues’. But I have read plenty about her — and if reports are correct, something terrible has happened in the intervening years. The serious-minded but likeable thirty-something I knew has transmuted into the assassin of Railtrack, the ass-kicker of Transport for London, the axe-wielder from the Treasury whom departmental ministers fear as acutely as they fear Gordon himself, with whose total authority she speaks.