Camilla Cavendish Biography

Hilary Camilla Cavendish, also known as Baroness Cavendish of Little Venice, is a British journalist and former Director of Policy for Prime Minister David Cameron.  She studied at Putney High School and graduated from Brasenose College, Oxford in 1989 with a first-class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.

She was a Kennedy Scholar for two years at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, gaining the degree of Master of Public Administration. She worked at The Times where she was Associate Editor, columnist and Chief Leader Writer from 2002 to 2012.

From 2012 to May 2015, she worked for The Sunday Times from The Times. She also worked as a McKinsey management consultant, an aid worker and as an aide to the CEO of Pearson plc. She was among the founders of the lobby group London First, and was the first CEO of the not-for-profit trust South Bank Employers’ Group, which masterminded the regeneration of the South Bank of the Thames in the late 1990s.

In 2015 to 2016, she was head of the prime minister’s policy unit at No10 Downing Street in succession to Jo Johnson. Amongst initiatives, she is credited with persuading the Prime Minister and his Chancellor about the benefits of a sugar tax. The Soft Drinks Industry Levy came into force in April 2018.

Camilla Cavendish Age

The Baroness Cavendish of Little Venice was born as Hilary Camilla Cavendish on 20 August 1968 . She is 50 years old as of 2018.

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Camilla Cavendish Husband

Cavendish is married to Huw van Steenis, a British financier who is the Senior Adviser to the Governor, Bank of England. The couple has three children together.

From 2000 to 2007, the Baroness was a Trustee of the Thames Festival Trust between and in 2002, she became a Trustee of the think-tank Policy Exchange. She got appointed as a board member for the Care Quality Commission on 3rd June 2013. In the same year, she was asked by Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Health, to lead a “An Independent Review into Healthcare Assistants and Support Workers in the NHS and social care settings”.

Her review was published in July 2013. She had a number recommendations which included “Common training standards across health and social care”, and a new ‘Certificate of Fundamental Care’. The review was also written in language that is meaningful to patients and the public. She was became a Trustee of the Foundation Years Trust chaired by Frank Field MP.

Camilla Cavendish Awards and Honors

• 2012 – Harold Wincott Senior Financial Journalist of the Year
• 2008 – Paul Foot Award for campaigning journalism
• 2009 – Campaigning Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards
• 2015 – She was reckoned by the Health Service Journal to be the 85th most influential person in the English NHS
• She was ranked the 5th most influential woman in the UK in BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour 2015 PowerList

She won her awards for her articles in The Times about child protection injustices which she claimed resulted from the Children Act 1989 and the practices of family courts dealing with child protection issues. In 2009, Secretary of State for Justice Jack Straw introduced legislation that opened the family courts to the media after Cavendish’s campaign on child protection.

Camilla Cavendish Twitter

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Camilla Cavendish Appearance  on BBC Question Time

Camilla Cavendish Interview

How to take on ‘Big Sugar’ and win

Updated: April 13, 2018

A few weeks ago I was interviewing medics in Boston, where I’m spending time researching the challenges of the ageing society. We were discussing the explosion in chronic diseases that is making people old before their time, and one said something that stuck with me. “Parents are literally killing with kindness,” he said, describing one of his patients, Susan, an 11-year-old girl who weighs 360 lb. She’s not even a teenager, but she already suffers from type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure. If she makes it to 50, he said, she will probably be in a wheelchair.

There was a brief moment, four years ago, when America seemed to have reached peak obesity. Sadly, that hope was dashed. Almost four in 10 American adults now qualify as obese and the people putting on weight fastest are teenage girls such as Susan. The awful truth is that it is now normal to be fat. People of average weight are in the minority.

The UK is not far behind. One of many things our two nations have in common is our sweet tooth. In trying to ward off obesity, we are fighting our addiction to sugar. And we are up against an industry that risks rapidly becoming the 21st-century equivalent of Big Tobacco.

I hope that doesn’t sound hysterical. Back in 2015, when I worked in Number 10 Downing Street, there was a mortifying moment when I was called a “health fascist” by one of David Cameron’s other advisers. We had just come out of the prime minister’s office, where I had been arguing that we should tax fizzy drinks. I was taken aback to hear myself described as fascist. I’d been against the smoking ban, I’d campaigned to legalise drugs, and I loathe the nanny state.

The trouble was, I had come up against the horror of the obesity epidemic. As a mother, I’d experienced the full force of pester power. As a board member of the English hospital regulator, the Care Quality Commission, I saw hospitals widening doors and reinforcing beds for super-sized patients whose illnesses could often have been prevented.

In Britain, one in 10 children are already obese when they arrive at primary school at the age of five. That doubles to one in five when they leave primary school, aged 10 or 11. And the most vulnerable are the poor — those living in areas that, according to a new study by the University of Arkansas, already have an “ecology of disadvantage”.

Consumers are understandably confused. For decades, we were warned off saturated fat. A profitable industry grew up selling “low-fat” processed foods. But these are a con. To make them tasty, manufacturers stuff them with carbohydrates and sugar. These create spikes in blood sugar levels, which lead to addictive cravings when blood sugar falls. The health consequences are dire: insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and obesity. Big Food offering low-fat cakes is the equivalent of Big Tobacco offering low-tar cigarettes. They make us feel better about ourselves, while keeping us hooked.

The tragedy is that some scientists have known about the pernicious effects of sugar for 40 years. In 1972, when health experts were wondering how to explain an explosion in heart disease, the leading British nutritionist John Yudkin argued that sugar was the main culprit, as it increased blood levels of triglycerides. His book, Pure, White and Deadly, pointed out that people had been eating butter and other fats for decades: what had changed was their consumption of sugar. But Yudkin’s research was so successfully rubbished by food manufacturers that many of his papers were not even accepted for publication. Industry successfully — and deliberately, according to documents recently unearthed at the University of California — shifted the blame to fat.

What we now know is that sugar is as addictive as cigarettes. The American paediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig has argued that sugar switches on the same hormonal pathways as nicotine. This explains why so many people never lose weight eating low-fat foods. It explains the explosion in type 2 diabetes. And it explains why it’s so hard to wean oneself off sugar.

Source: https://www.ft.com