EXCLUSIVE: Kate Bingham, chair of Boris Johnson's vaccine taskforce, has charged taxpayers £670,000 for her own team of boutique PR consultants

According to leaked docs, eight full-time consultants from London firm Admiral Associates are on the equivalent of £165K salaries
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Bingham, who is married to Tory minister, Jesse Norman, and went to school with Rachel Johnson, is said to have "insisted" on hiring the team.

This is despite fears that they duplicate work of press officers at BEIS, where task force sits

Source: "I don't know what they do." 2/

Alok Sharma, the business secretary, did not sign off the expenditure, which has cost around £500K already, with contracts running until the end of the year

Instead, it was signed off by a civil servant

The team helps with day to day comms - and a Spotify vaccine podcast 3/

Figures in No 10 are furious with Bingham after we reported that she showed "official sensitive" info to a venture capital event in the US

But she is also scheduled to appear at a $2,460 conference for bankers and executives next year - to discuss her work as vaccines tsar 4/

Her select committee appearance has also raised eye-brows: Bingham called our story "nonsense" and "irresponsible"

Asked if she'd disclosed info that wasn't in the public domain, she said: "No."

Many in govt think she misled MPs and made herself a hostage to fortune 5/

As early as Thursday, I went to Bingham with a list of statements made in her talk - asking her to provide evidence of when she'd made them in public

If she was unable to do so, I said, she should retract her statement and apologise

She did neither https://twitter.com/Gabriel_Pogrund/status/1322646591010971649?s=20

Bingham's conduct matters because of wider concerns about consultants in Whitehall, personal appointments and transparency

Tomorrow, for instance, we reveal that the membership of the Vaccines Task Force is entirely secret.

This is what an FOI came back with:

It is also irritating many in government, who think her role has become too ill-defined: she reports directly to the PM, is based in BEIS, and works with Alok Sharma and Matt Hancock but is managed by apparently no one.

And yet she is able to assemble her own team of PR gurus

More in tomorrow's Sunday Times with @Direthoughts - top investigative journalist who you should follow

Make sure to read the story here in full - a long read with lots of new details. And subscribe now if you haven't already https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/vaccine-tsar-kate-bingham-runs-up-670-000-pr-bill-sjxmrz2bx