Baroness Hogg, the businesswoman, will chair the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) from next May, the quango that sets non-enforceable standards of corporate governance and financial reporting.
Lady Hogg, 63, was appointed by Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, to the £120,000-a-year, two days a week post, to succeed Sir Christopher Hogg (no relation).
The award caps a year that has not been entirely kind to Lady Hogg, or to her immediate family. She was born into one Tory dynasty, as daughter of Lord Boyd-Carpenter, chief secretary to the Treasury under the Macmillan and Douglas-Home administrations, and married into a second. Her father-in-law was Lord Hailsham, and her marriage to Douglas Hogg brought with it her second title, Viscountess Hailsham.
But her husband, MP for Sleaford and North Hykeham, became one of the emblematic faces of the Commons expenses scandal when it was reported that he had claimed £2,200 to have his moat cleaned.
Mr Hogg insisted that no public money had been involved in the work. Yet his pleas of ignorance were delivered to camera crews while striding about the streets of Westminster in an archetypal toff’s green flat cap, a widely ridiculed performance that subsequently appeared on YouTube.
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He has said he will not stand in the next election.
His wife, who in 2001 became the first woman to chair a FTSE 100 company, announced her resignation as chairman of 3i, the venture capital group at the July annual meeting. 3i has refused to comment on the reasons for her planned departure next year and said that the search for her replacement has yet to commence.
3i has had a difficult two years. Ahead of the downturn, the company elected to distribute more than £2 billion to shareholders, leaving it badly strapped for cash.
It had also elected to turn its focus away from the small, individual investments 3i was created to make, in favour of large, private equity-style stakes in larger companies, some of them unsuccessful.
The policy at the start of this year cost the head of Philip Yea, the highly regarded chief executive. Some saw him as the whipping boy for Lady Hogg and the rest of the board, who must have approved the change of direction, and there were reports at the time that she would go.
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She has been deputy chairman of the FRC since 2007. Her predecessor, Sir Christopher, this week issued a overhaul of boardroom practice for listed companies, with an update to the Combined Code.
One proposal was that either the chairman or all the directors should face annual re-election by shareholders. The idea did not meet with universal acclaim from experts on corporate governance.
Last month Lady Hogg acquired another role in financial regulation. She was one of five new senior advisers brought into the Financial Services Authority to help develop the regulatory framework for financial institutions.
Lady Hogg, who declined to be interviewed, left Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, to become a financial journalist, serving for two years, as Sarah Hogg, as economics editor of The Times. She left financial journalism to become head of John Major’s policy unit. Here, she attracted opprobrium as the alleged architect of the unsuccessful Back to Basics campaign, which had the misfortune to coincide with a tidal wave of Tory sleaze.
She has spoken before about the need for a work-life balance, particularly for women executives — legend has her going into labour with one of her two children while working at her desk at The Economist.
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But she has also served in a wide range of boardrooms, including GKN, the engineer, NatWest, P&O Princess Cruises, BG Group and, as of last year and in time for the contested approach by Kraft, Cadbury.
Lady Hogg has admitted that when she first arrived in the boardroom, there were only two patterns for women: “helpless little women and headmistresses”. She has said that she tended towards the second role.
Lord Oakeshott of Seagrove Bay, the Liberal Democrat peer who served with her on the economics committee of the House of Lords, said: “Quite irrespective of our politics, which are far from identical, I always found she had a refreshing and independent mind and was not afraid to speak it.”
Some have wondered if, given her strong Tory connections, she might one day take a more active political role. Lord Oakeshott said: “If, by any chance, the Conservatives were to form the next government, I think she would be an excellent minister.”
She has, however, made some enemies. As a Governor of the BBC, she was identified by outgoing Director-General Greg Dyke as one of the architects of his downfall in the wake of the Hutton affair. Mr Dyke claimed that she “rarely seemed to leave her politics or prejudices at the door”.