A trusty aide butts in yet again

Joanna Hindley, Culture Secretary Maria Miller’s special adviser, has got her boss into hot water by telling reporters looking into Miller’s expenses that she wanted to “flag up” Miller’s link to press regulation post-Leveson. Was this a thinly-veiled threat?

Previously media adviser to Prince Charles’s Foundation for Architecture and the Built Environment, Hindley has a habit of interceding. When her then boss, Hank Dittmar, was being interviewed, she “kept instructing Hank as to what he should or shouldn’t say, even on entirely non-contentious issues,” says one writer. “He looked rather intimidated.”