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The founders’ group around Michael Young had been ostracised under her predecessor She wooed them. The Council warmed to a director who said the same in public as in private. So did the President and the Chairman throughout her time, Lord Howe of Aberavon and Brian Yates, though neither was cut from her Calvinist cloth. She found good managers, and only occasionally feared their ambitions. She would have preferred, perhaps, to be her own director of campaigning, but on the policy side she knew where to find wise heads, including her former tutor at Edinburgh, James Cornford.”Even as a student,” Cornford remembers, “she was never one of the ‘enrag?, but a woman of powerful concentration and thought.” So, when staff or colleagues found her looking up at them to say, “Quite honestly this is a load o’ nonsense”, they knew that some serious nonsense analysis was in the offing.She was never just the formidable engine of destruction that her opponents saw.

She could see that the organisation was not punching its weight, as she told the senior managers.She knew what she wanted: a campaigning team that would empower the consumer, not just with better goods, but with better and safer services as well. In an interview with The Independent on Sunday to mark her arrival just nine years ago she was typically explicit. The targets were environmental damage, mendacious advertising, failure to regulate financial services and the privatised utilities, and oversight of health, housing, education and transport.This seemed an abrasive agenda to some at CA, especially when coupled with new product developments that took some of its own products and endorsements closer to the marketplace.She won through because she was honest as well as devastating She respected CA’s tradition while altering its role. The headhunters called in to help compile a shortlist did not include her in the list of industrial and financial suits they recommended The strongest might have been chosen, but withdrew. McKechnie was called, and chosen forthwith; the first woman director. She was shaken by what she found, which she described with characteristic bluntness as “functioning more for the benefit of those who worked in it than for homeless people”.

She created appropriate management structures, forced the organisation to be professional. In her time at Shelter its funding base increased tenfold.To conduct a successful rearguard action against the housing policies of a twice-elected government secure in its own fierce ideology, Sheila McKechnie needed the sharpest profile. Public-sector housing was shrinking, homeless young people less able to access benefits. Then in the late Eighties the collapse of the private-housing boom left millions of home owners with negative equity too.