Margaret hodge

If the newspaper reports are correct and Margaret Hodge is about to be named as the next chair of Ofcom, it’s a surprising choice. The current chair, Michael Grade, had a storied television career, whereas Hodge has never worked in the media. But the most jaw-dropping thing about this appointment is that she’s 81. Not that I’ve got anything against octogenarians – I’ll be one myself in the blink of an eye. But the government has. In its manifesto, Labour promised to introduce a mandatory retirement age of 80 in the House of Lords, and it’s already set the wheels in motion. Why is Margaret Hodge considered to be too old to sit in the Upper House, but not too old to chair a public regulator? To complicate things, Sir Keir Starmer made her a peer in August 2024.

The Goldsmith effect Sir: Much as I admire filial loyalty, I cannot allow Zac Goldsmith’s article about his father to go uncorrected (‘My dad saved the pound’, 28 February). Sir James Goldsmith was a formidable campaigner against the European Union and the euro currency, but at no point did he alter government policy. Zac Goldsmith suggests that I did not offer a referendum on membership of the euro currency out of conviction. This is wrong. I believed that any decision to abandon sterling — which I myself did not favour — was so fundamental that it would need national endorsement. On constitutional grounds some Cabinet members dissented, but many will confirm that I was seeking agreement for such a policy long before the Referendum party was founded.

In my Yorkshire town of Helmsley the NatWest branch, originally an outpost of Beckett & Co of Leeds, has closed down — collateral damage of its crippled parent RBS’s continuing struggle for viability. Our branch of the Australian-owned Yorkshire Bank, descendant of the West Riding Penny Savings institution, became an antique shop some time ago. HSBC, formerly Midland, is now a hairdressing salon. When they arrived a century ago, all three were ‘challenger banks’ of their day. But now they have gone, no challengers have ridden in to replace them — unless we count Handelsbanken, the progressively old-fashioned Swedish retail bank that has a thriving franchise down the road at Scarborough.

Most people, when they hear the word populist, will think of Marine Le Pen going mad about Muslim immigrants or a Ukipper saying he wouldn't want an Albanian living next door. But yesterday we witnessed a different kind of populism: the deceptively right-on variety, which aims its black-and-white moralistic fury not at cash-starved people at the bottom of society, but at wealthy individuals at the top. The purveyor of populism this time was Margaret Hodge, panto queen of the Public Accounts Committee, her target was some HSBC suits, and it made for an unedifying spectacle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNdu-ueG78o Hodge has in recent years become Parliament's poundshop Robespierre, a one-woman mopper-up of moral rot in the establishment, the purifier of the political realm.

Despite being the heiress to a steel fortune, Margaret Hodge never stops criticising multinational corporations over their tax affairs including the use of offshore havens and complex company schemes that befuddle the taxman. BP, for example, reportedly has 85 subsidiaries in a variety of tax havens built up over many years. That has not stopped moaning Margaret taking a hefty £8,000 donation from Bryan Sanderson. Who is he? Well, he is the former BP director, who worked at the company for over three decades.

Today’s NAO report on free schools has recognised the ‘clear progress’ we have made opening 174 schools in three years with significantly lower costs than Labour’s school programmes. But, as Isabel Hardman, Toby Young and Policy Exchange’s Jonathan Simons have pointed out, instead of reading the report the BBC and PAC Chairwoman Margaret Hodge have chosen to ignore the facts. The BBC’s headline claims ‘free school costs budget trebled to £1.5bn, says report.’ But the NAO report states that ‘many new schools have been established quickly and at relatively low cost’. At £6.

The Durand boarding school project is a wonderfully ambitious attempt to give children from one of the most deprived parts of London the kind of education that has traditionally only be available to a privileged few. But earlier this week, the National Audit Office criticised the Department for Education for handing over money for the project without sufficiently assessing the risks. Margaret Hodge, chair of the Public Accounts Committee, followed up with a letter to the parish council questioning the financial sense of the project. However, as a letter from the school’s head Sir Greg Martin reveals, Hodge had not spoken to Durand before writing the letter.

Phyllis has gone to Tottenham Court Road, but Ada is having a day off. In fact she’s slumbering deep below us, just south of Bond Street station with her head under Grays Antique Centre. Phyllis and Ada are twin sisters, 140 metres long, weighing 1,000 tonnes each. I’m imagining them as domesticated versions of those monstrous sandworms on the planet -Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s Dune, with their crystal teeth and ‘bellows breath of cinnamon’. They are the tunnel-boring machines that are munching through London’s sub-terrain from Royal Oak to Farringdon where, some time in autumn 2014, they will bump into their cousins Elizabeth and Victoria, coming the other way from Limmo Peninsula in Docklands.

Ever since Margaret Hodge took over the chairmanship of the Public Accounts Committee, its evidence sessions have become rather lively: more like a fearsome grilling from the headmistress than a slow-moving chinwag with a group of MPs hoping for the next division bell. Hodge was on terrifying form today as senior officials from HMRC sat down to take evidence. She directed her teacherly wrath in particular at Lin Homer, chief executive and permanent secretary of HMRC, who gave the bulk of the evidence on the department's work in tackling tax avoidance. Homer appeared rather shell-shocked by the onslaught, like a pupil trying to explain why she wasn't wearing a tie and had rolled her skirt.