Kate Bingham: the grande dame of venture capitalists

The success of Britain’s vaccine strategy is largely down to one woman – Kate Bingham, a biotech expert for a venture-capital firm. It’s not the first time she has thrown herself head first into a big challenge.

Kate Bingham
(Image credit: © Tom Kates/SV Health Managers)

When Britain’s former vaccine tsar ran into trouble over the size of a PR bill last November, it was seized upon by critics as further evidence of the current government’s “chumocracy”. Kate Bingham is married to Treasury minister Jesse Norman, her links with Boris Johnson’s clan were shown to stretch back to Oxford (where she was a contemporary of the PM), and beyond. To the world-weary, a further allegation – that she had given away sensitive information to private investors at an investment conference – seemed par for the course.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.