Charlotte Hogg: a family tree deeply rooted in the British establishment
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Version 0 of 1. When Andrew Tyrie, the Conservative MP who chairs the Treasury select committee, opened a hearing with Charlotte Hogg a week ago he recalled how he had lunched with her grandfather in the members’ dining room at Westminster. Another Conservative MP, Jacob Rees-Mogg, recalled Hogg Snr speaking in Greek during a visit to Eton. The 46-year-old deputy governor of the Bank of England has no doubt heard many reminiscences about her paternal grandfather: the late Quintin Hogg, who became Lord Hailsham, nearly succeeded Harold Macmillan as Conservative party leader in 1963. Her family tree spreads its roots through British political history and the nation’s best public schools – Eton, Stowe and Harrow as well the prestigious Catholic boarding school St Mary’s Ascot, attended by Hogg and her mother – to Oxford University. She grew up in Kettlethorpe Hall, a country estate in Lincolnshire, famous for its moat after her father – the former MP Douglas Hogg – submitted an expenses claim that included £2,200 for cleaning it. Both her parents are peers and both served in John Major’s government. Douglas, who retired from parliament shortly after the expenses scandal, holds the title of 3rd Viscount Hailsham. Her mother, Sarah Hogg, now a baroness, is an economist whose career has spanned newspaper and TV journalism, heading Major’s No 10 policy unit and then becoming the first woman to chair a FTSE 100 company – the venture capital group 3i. Charlotte Hogg’s grandparents and great-grandparents were pillars of the establishment. Baroness Hogg’s father was Baron John Boyd-Carpenter, an MP who served in the Scots Guards and was chief secretary to the Treasury. He had followed his father’s path: Major Sir Archibald Boyd-Carpenter, also an MP who was also a treasury minister. The connections do not end there. On her father’s side, her aunt Mary is a high court judge, while her uncle Thomas on her mother’s side was the deputy chief of defence staff in the mid-1990s. Charlotte Hogg followed the normal family path to Oxford, but then her career path diverged. Instead of politics, she chose a career in business. She started as a graduate trainee at the Bank of England, moving on to consultancy McKinsey and then investment bank Morgan Stanley. She then moved to credit checking agency Experian and the UK arm of Spanish bank Santander before returning to the Bank of England in 2013, where she was appointed chief operating officer. A mother of two, she is married to Steve Sacks – a management consultant, former Lloyds banker and now an executive at luxury retailer Burberry. Hogg is also an accomplished horse rider and long-distance runner. It is her promotion to deputy governor 10 days ago that led to her appearance before MPs and stoked the controversy over why she had not disclosed that her brother, also called Quintin, is a director at Barclays. She told MPs she took “full responsibility for the oversight” and that it was “regrettable” she had told them – erroneously – that she had already disclosed potential conflicts of interest. Her new role includes oversight of banking, as well a seat on the rate-setting monetary policy committee. Given her family’s history in the public eye, the scrutiny she is facing this weekend from MPs may feel like second nature. |