THE GATEKEEPER

Last updated at 09:07 21 April 2007


As Director of Government Relations, Ruth Turner, 36, is one of Tony Blair's most trusted aides.

Since her appointment in May 2005, Miss Turner has desperately tried to keep a low profile - in contrast to her predecessors Anji Hunter and Baroness Sally Morgan.

She is admired by Mr Blair for being hardworking, efficient and discreet. But her relative youth and inexperience contrast sharply with the status of political veterans Miss Hunter and Lady Morgan.

Her immediate boss is Jonathan Powell. They, along with director of communications David Hill, make up the core group of Blair's aides.

Dubbed the "gatekeeper of Number 10", she is a steely operator who regularly puts in 18-hour days. She is single and childless and has preferred to concentrate on her career. Her father Denys Turner is a leading Irish writer and a professor of theology at Cambridge.

As one of Mr Blair's chief fixers, she will have been intimately involved in any decisions about allocating peerages to wealthy donors and rewarding supporters.

Suspicions that she had failed to co-operate sufficiently with detectives triggered her arrest at dawn at her London home. The move led to complaints from some in the Labour Party about police harassment.

Those who have worked with Miss Turner insist she is incapable of wrongdoing.

But others point out that as a party loyalist her first interest will have been promoting Labour's interests.

Most watched News videos