What Dido Harding did last summer

The cross-party public accounts committee may well have labelled Dido Harding’s test and trace operation a £37bn white elephant, but her ladyship has not let criticism of how she plans large projects get her down.

After stepping down from her role last April and then failing to become head of NHS England, Mandrake can disclose that Harding spent summer 2021 drawing up complicated plans to create a three-tier stone amphitheatre-style seating area in the garden of her £2m Grade II listed North Somerset estate – spending her own money this time, rather than the taxpayer’s.

Whether Baroness Harding – with her husband, the anti-corruption champion John Penrose – wish to subject their friends and neighbours to nightly orations from the Greek tragedies is unclear, but, should anyone’s attentions wander, there’s also a chimaera and a BBQ depicted in the designs sent to the local council.

The couple put in their application “to alter the layout and height of the existing garden retaining wall west of the house to create a stepped seating area”, in July. They were granted planning permission last October, the same month Harding stepped down from her remaining public role, as head of NHS Improvement.

At least this time around there were no complaints from neighbours who branded their last building project five years ago “ugly”. The pair had wanted to build what was considered to be an “eyesore” swimming pool complex that would have overshadowed a historic 15th-century church.

Questions were raised at the time about how the Penroses, who only reside at the estate at weekends, managed to get the go-ahead for the plans. Baroness Harding clearly has money to burn: in 2014 she pocketed £6m as the boss of TalkTalk, not long after its computer programmes were hacked and thousands of customers’ details were compromised.