From the blog: They say a leopard never changes its spots but a government adviser can certainly change their political colours, it seems.

It would have been hard to miss all the hoopla yesterday in which Conservative pensions minister Ros Altmann was reported to have been booted out of the Labour party on Monday - news which had many a pension commentator all a-flutter on Twitter.

The Guardian reported that Ros was a card-carrying Labour supporter right up until Monday, despite being made a Tory peer following this year’s election result. Whoops.

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It would have been hard to miss all the hoopla yesterday in which Conservative pensions minister Ros Altmann was reported to have been booted out of the Labour party on Monday - news which had many a pension commentator all a-flutter on Twitter.

The Guardian reported that Ros was a card-carrying Labour supporter right up until Monday, despite being made a Tory peer following this year’s election result. Whoops.

The paper said she had signed up to the red team back in March 2014, which was around the time George Osborne announced his historic Budget changes (the first round, that is).

Leaving behind the gleeful shrieks of politicos revelling in the idea of a mole in the Tory camp, the important question is does any of this really matter?

Close to that time Ros was concerned about things such as the harm quantitative easing had wreaked on pension schemes, and two months later, shortly after that bombshell Budget, forecasting the near-death of annuities and the subsequent move by providers into the DB market.

It’s almost hard to remember a time when it seemed as though the country would be in the hands of Labour or a Labour-led coalition, but perhaps the former adviser to Tony Blair viewed the future of the UK and its pensions industry through, as it were, rose-tinted lenses.

But leaving behind the gleeful shrieks of politicos revelling in the idea of a mole in the Tory camp, the important question is does any of this really matter?

Several backers on Twitter were keen to point out that her passion for pensions is paramount.

Indeed Hargreaves Lansdown’s head of pensions research, Tom McPhail, stuck his neck out with a press release to remind people of Ros’s remit.

He said: “Ros was brought into the current government because she has very considerable expertise in pensions and because she has been an effective campaigner for justice on pension related issues.

“Her political sympathies are less important than whether she can perform a good job as the pensions minister.”

As an industry it is arguably more appropriate to focus on the fact that while Ros’s political colours may have changed (albeit slowly and with some tricky-to-explain overlap) her values, as far as we can tell, have not.

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