Ah ha! That was fun,” she says, a glint in her piercing blue eyes. “We signed the world’s first contract with Pfizer-BioNTech… and it showed Whitehall could work at speed.”

From a small cottage, Bingham juggled vaccine suppliers, Whitehall, the media circus – and her daughter’s exams. Political manoeuvring, miscommunications and administrative meddling nearly jeopardised the project. But perseverance paid off.The 56-year-old hopes that her book – which she co-wrote with Dr Tim Hames, a journalist, academic and former director general of the British Venture Capital Association – will help spur change.

Unless she had insisted on directly reporting to the Prime Minister when she took the job, she “probably wouldn’t have succeeded, because there would have been too many people in the chain telling us we couldn’t do it”. It was a condition she had discussed with her husband, the Conservative MP Jesse Norman, who managed the furlough scheme as financial secretary to the Treasury. The pair soon became known as “Mr Tax and Mrs Vax”. The ears of the National Audit Office may burn (she dubs their “help” a foolish and expensive joke); most everyone else emerges from this tale, written with the help of Tim Hames (a former chief leader writer for the Times), with due credit and generous thanks. Indeed, Bingham’s candid account will be uncomfortable reading for those who nurse a dogmatic hostility to “insiders”. Roger Highfield and Peter Coveney Chaired by Irene Tracey Vice-chancellor’s Interview. Virtual You: How Building Your Digital Twin Will Revolutionise Medicine Sheldonian Theatre 12:00pm Fri 31 Friday, 31 March 2023 See this event Caroline Moorehead Interviewed by Alexandra Pringle Edda Mussolini: The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe Exeter College: Marquee 10:00am Fri 31 Friday, 31 March 2023 See this event But, as she works her way through the list, Bingham has saved her “biggest gripe” for last: leadership, expertise, and a reversion to an “adversarial” relationship with industry since her exit.

Reviews

Bingham and Hames’s accessible, edge-of-the-seat account of how British innovators vaccinated the UK and much of the rest of the world is also a quiet, compelling, non-partisan argument for dialogue between business and politics.' On the other hand, those teams who were fully ready were anxious to make an impact. Bingham only found out about Oxford University’s non-profit vaccine partnership with AstraZeneca over the radio, and Pfizer, partnering with BioNTech, much preferred to throw its own money at things than rely on any taskforce handholding.