The new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown wanted to appoint his former confidante at the Treasury, NRI bureaucrat Shriti Vadera, as a senior adviser at Number 10.
LONDON: The new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown wanted to appoint his former confidante at the Treasury, NRI bureaucrat Shriti Vadera, as a senior adviser at Number 10, but was overruled by Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell, media reports on Sunday said.
O'Donnell was previously Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, from where Vadera took a long trip to India to enable personal clashes in the department to be resolved.
After O'Donnell's apparent intervention, Brown gave 'Shriti the Shriek' a peerage and made her a junior minister at the Department for International Development.
Baroness Vadera of Holland Park, who was born in Uganda but grew up in India, is known for her determined manner.
She was described as 'forceful' by Stephen Byers, the former transport secretary, during his evidence to the High Court in the unsuccessful case brought by Railtrack shareholders in 2005.
They claimed that the company had been forced into administration by the Government to avoid paying them compensation.
The court was shown emails sent by Vadera, who was known in Whitehall as Gordon's Representative on Earth, speaking of 'triggering' and 'engineering' Railtrack's insolvency.
In one, Vadera identified Tom Winsor, the rail regulator, as an obstacle to the insolvency scheme. She wrote of measures to 'take Winsor out'.
As the Prime Minister's biographer, Tom Bower, remarked, it was 'the language of a Mafia godmother'.
A Cabinet Office spokesman, however, insisted that Sir Gus had no 'objections of that kind' to Vadera's appointment.
A Treasury spokesman said, "She was not suspended at any point while she was at the Treasury."
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