Head of Boris Johnson’s vaccine taskforce bills taxpayers £670,000 for a team of boutique PR consultants to oversee her media strategy
- Kate Bingham, 55, has hired eight full-time consultants from Admiral Associates
- Costs involved mean that each consultant is on the equivalent of £167,000 a year
- Team help Ms Bingham to draft statements and prepare for media appearances
The head of Boris Johnson’s vaccine taskforce has billed the taxpayer £670,000 for a team of boutique PR consultants to oversee her media strategy.
Kate Bingham, 55, has already spent £500,000 on eight full-time consultants from Admiral Associates – with the team contracted until the end of the year.
The costs involved mean that each consultant is on the equivalent of a £167,000 a year salary, according to leaked documents.
It is understood that the team help Ms Bingham to draft statements and prepare for media appearances.
Kate Bingham, 55, (pictured) has already spent £500,000 on eight full-time consultants from Admiral Associates – with the team contracted until the end of the year
Concerns had been raised that hiring the eight consultants would duplicate the work of more than 100 communications staff already working in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
But Ms Bingham is said to have ‘insisted’ before the decision was signed off by civil servants – rather than Business Secretary Alok Sharma, according to the Sunday Times.
One Whitehall source told the publication: ‘[The consultants are] bossing around civil servants but no one knows who they are, what their experience is or what authority they have.’
Meanwhile, it emerged that Ms Bingham, who is married to Conservative Minister Jesse Norman, will hold a virtual conference next year for ‘executives, bankers [and] venture capitalists’.
It is thought she will discuss her part in the taskforce to ‘find and manufacture a Covid-19 vaccine’ with tickets priced at $2,460 (£1,870) per head.
MailOnline has contacted the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and Admiral Associates for comment.
The revelation comes after Ms Bingham was slammed for revealing secret government plans on potential vaccines to financiers at an American venture capital conference (above) earlier this month
Ms Bingham was appointed to lead the UK’s efforts to research and produce a coronavirus vaccine by the Prime Minister (pictured) in May – despite having no vaccines expertise
The revelation comes after Ms Bingham was slammed for revealing secret government plans on potential vaccines to financiers at an American venture capital conference earlier this month.
She spent an hour talking about the UK Government’s Covid strategy to a ‘premier webinar and networking event’ for women in private equity hosted by a Massachusetts company at $200-a-head.
Video footage of the event shows Ms Bingham sharing a detailed list of vaccines, which the UK government is closely monitoring and could later invest in, in her presentation slides.
Ms Bingham was appointed to lead the UK’s efforts to research and produce a coronavirus vaccine by the Prime Minister in May – despite having no vaccines expertise.
She also retains her role a managing director of SV Health Investors, a Boston-based venture capital company that had $2billion worth of investments in biotech or medical ventures in 2017.
The Oxford and Harvard-educated businesswoman spent almost 30 years at the company, and is lauded as having helped fund six drugs for patients with autoimmune diseases and cancer.
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has said only that she does not work for SV ‘full time’.