Margaret Hodge is very sure of what she is trying to do. “I want to change the world,” she tells me over a mug of tea in the front room of her home in Islington. She is deadly serious.
As the chair of the House of Commons public accounts committee (PAC), Hodge is in a good position to realise her ambition. The PAC’s dry, procedural-sounding remit to examine “the accounts showing the appropriation of the sums granted to parliament to meet the public expenditure” gives her latitude to investigate every aspect of our government’s finances. When she speaks, everyone from Google executives to the BBC’s senior management pays attention.
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