Daily Mail, Thursday, March 5, 2020 QQQVictim of
misogyny
... or just a
bully with
a vicious
tongue?
Johnson: I’ll stick by Priti
As row rages over
who really runs
Britain, is she...
structive dismissal. The fallout
has seen similarly ugly claims
aired regarding two of her other
ministerial spells: at both the
Department for Work and Pen-
sions, where she was a junior min-
ister for 14 months in 2015-16, and
DfID, which she ran from July
2016 to November 2017.
At the DWP, it has emerged that
a senior aide took an overdose
having lost her job shortly after
Patel arrived. The woman com-
plained of being bullied and har-
assed, and was paid £25,000 in an
out-of-court settlement.
According to legal correspond-
ence leaked to the BBC, the former
civil servant claimed that some of
the abuse she suffered came
directly from Patel, who in one
incident shouted at her to ‘get
lost’. Sources close to Patel say theclaim is ‘ludicrous’, that the
woman only worked for her for a
fortnight and was ‘already in the
process of quitting’ when she took
over as employment minister.
Patel denies all the claims made
against her.
At DfID, two permanent secre-
taries were allegedly informed of
bullying complaints against Patel
during her tenure, while an aide
was signed off with depression.
A former official in the depart-
ment has told The Times that
Patel ‘would come out [of] her
office and say, “Why is everyone so
f****** useless”.’
Another claimed: ‘She was
reviled for her rudeness and insen-
sitivity. She could not have been
more hated for the way she
treated people. She was just vile.’
According to a third, ‘while theword “bullying” is used, with her
it’s not really personal, as if she
took a dislike to certain people, it
was her typical manner. One
minute she would come across as
rude or ungrateful, and another
she would be being dismissive or
hostile in the face of advice.’
The problem with these and
many other complaints is they are
short on detail and context.W
IThOuT knowing what
p r o m p t e d i n d i v i d u a l
incidents, it’s impossible
t o p r o p e r l y j u d g e
whether the bullying allegations
are justified.
‘Priti is a tough cookie, and to
be frank doesn’t mind being called
a demanding boss because she is,’says a friend who spoke with her
this week. ‘She is forceful and
pushy, and is the first to admit
that she can be abrasive. Part of
that comes from her parents, who
came to the uK from uganda
with nothing and worked 18-hour
days to build up a small chain of
newsagents. her view is that staff
in the home Office need to dis-
play similar gumption. They need
to be told to pull their socks up
because... it’s an organisation
which is unfit for purpose.’
Another source says: ‘If you go
into a failing department, which is
what the home Office is, at some
point you will need to tell people
that they are failing. But there are
ways of doing that, and the civil
service is not used to being told
something robustly. It’s a world
where people never fail. They justget moved sideways.’ A pressing
example of the ways in which
home Office civil servants work
to frustrate their elected masters
was aired on Radio 4’s Today pro-
gramme on Monday, where former
immigration minister Damian
Green told how mandarins who
worked for him created a secret
unit to write a new immigration
Bill, against his specific instruc-
tions. ‘[The unit] was kept in
existence for about nine months,’
he recalled
On the other side, rumours
doing the rounds in Whitehall
suggest that hostile home Office
staff originally angered Patel by
failing to show her full briefing
documents because they feared
she would misunderstand or mis-
interpret their contents.
‘She is not up to the job and
does not know what she’s doing,’
one official told the Mail. ‘She
refuses to listen to civil servants
and instead only listens to special
advisers who are young, inexperi-
enced appointees. In interviews,
unless she has a script to follow, it
always ends in tears.’B
y way of an example, the
source cited Patel’s recent
claim that the uK has
8.5million ‘economically
inactive’ citizens who can do jobs
currently filled by Eu nationals
when free movement ends.
‘These 8.5million include stu-
dents aged between 16 and 18,
along with pensioners and people
who are long-term sick. how can
they take on low-skilled jobs? It
beggars belief.’ The Whitehall
source also highlighted a recent
broadcast interview in which
Patel confused ‘terrorism’ and
‘counter terrorism’ resulting in a
nonsensical pledge to be ‘tough
on counter terrorism’.
Staff who attempt to prevent her
making such errors are accused of
seeking to frustrate the Govern-
ment’s agenda, the source com-
plained, when in fact they are
merely attempting to help.
‘The home Office faces huge
challenges, not least redesigning
the entire immigration system by
the end of the year. up to now,
Priti has basically been going into
meetings shouting “mandate
mandate mandate”, and her civil
servants have been replying “real-
ity reality reality” and nothing is
being achieved.’
Patel’s ultimate fate rests with
Boris Johnson, who will decide on
her future once Sir Alex Allan, the
Cabinet Office’s inquisitor gen-
eral, completes an investigation
into the complaints against her.
It will explore whether she
breached the ministerial code
which states that ministers
should ‘treat all those with whom
they come into contact with con-
sideration and respect’.
Given this fact, it was significant
that the Prime Minister invited
her to sit next to him in Parlia-
ment yesterday. A signal, perhaps,
that a no-holds-barred fight with
the civil service is something
No 10 is quietly spoiling for.Page 13Demanding:
Priti Patel
admits she
can be
abrasive