Gina Coladangelo: the millionaire lobbyist quietly appointed to top government roles

At the top of her LinkedIn profile alongside the Government’s royal coat of arms, Gina Coladangelo boasts of being a non-executive director at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).

Her part-time appointment in September last year made headlines because that listing was one of the few places where her role was made public.

She adds how she studied philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Oxford. It was there she met fellow student Matt Hancock, who two decades later became her boss.

Now, their friendship and alleged affair have become the focus of intense scrutiny amid claims he showed favouritism to someone who, at the very least, was a university friend.

Ms Coladangelo met Mr Hancock while they were both working on a student radio.

"He is very determined, he likes setting goals and meeting them," she told Radio 4’s Profile, broadcast at the height of the coronavirus crisis last year.

"We met at the student radio station, Oxygen FM. I read the news and Matt read the sport. I’ve always joked with him that he did the sport because he wasn’t good enough to read the news. But, I think it gave him an early heads up to aggressive questioning from journalists."

Gina Lucia Coladangelo was born in 1977 in Hitching, Hertfordshire, to Heather, 69, a former florist, and Rino, 70, an Italian multi-millionaire chief executive of Rephine Ltd, a pharmaceutical consultancy specialising in compliance and regulatory affairs.

According to her father’s LinkedIn page, he studied medicine at the University College London, became a member of the Royal College of Physicians and specialised in gastroenterology and was even a managing director of an NHS hospital.

Her younger brother, Roberto, 42, is an executive director of strategy and innovation at Partnering Health, which is understood to have contracts with the NHS.

Ms Coladangelo first married in 2004, before later marrying Oliver Tress, founder of Oliver Bonas, the fashion chain where she is communications director. They have three children.

She was also a director for Luther Pendragon, a lobbying firm focusing on the health, environment and energy sectors.

When it emerged Mr Hancock appointed her in March last year as an unpaid adviser, before making her a non-executive director in September on £15,000 a year, there were claims of a "chumocracy" culture at the department.

The lobbyist’s discreet appointment was in stark contrast to how Mr Hancock’s predecessor, Jeremy Hunt, hired a team of highly experienced non-executive directors by publishing a press release posted on gov.uk in 2017.

When a Sunday paper asked last year why Mr Hancock’s "lobbyist pal" got a job, a department spokesman said her "advice and expertise" was needed as part of an "unprecedented response to this global pandemic".

The appointment did not break any rules, in part because there are no rules about who a government department boss can hire.

As a self-proclaimed "marketing and communications" expert, it is not surprising she was seen on the sidelines at many of Mr Hancock’s television appearances.

Her gushing praise for Mr Hancock on the Radio 4 programme was certainly good PR. Described as a "close friend" - rather than an unpaid adviser which she was at the time - she told how his mother "was a very strong influence on him".

She laughed as she explained how as a student reporter he overslept despite being despatched to cover a Twickenham international rugby match and so was forced to file after watching the game in a pub.

More recently, she has "liked" numerous LinkedIn videos and posts produced by Mr Hancock, which scroll alongside PR puffs about her husband’s chain of shops.

Her name also now appears on the lists of DHSC’s departmental board members, alongside the likes of Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer.

Outside her family’s £4 million townhouse in Wandsworth, south-west London, a neighbour described Ms Coladangelo as “gorgeous”, before pausing to ask: “Why Matt Hancock?”