Some of us saw a dark cloud or two gathering on the horizon just about the time of the announcement of the heavily-loaded Indian cabinet in Britain. We weren’t expecting them to advance quite as soon as they just have above the Home Office. The top official in the Home Office, Sir Philip Rutnam, unleashed a string of seriously strong allegations against Home Secretary Priti Patel while resigning from his position on Saturday.
Rutnam said Patel had run a “vicious and orchestrated briefing campaign against him”. She had, he noted, denied this to the cabinet office but “I regret I do not believe her”.
Rutnam said: “My experience has been extreme but I consider there is evidence that it is part of a wider pattern of behaviour.” He said staff had alleged that Patel’s conduct had included “shouting and swearing, belittling people, making unreasonable and repeated demands”.
Rutnam added that as the top civil servant in the home department, it was his job “to protect the health, safety and well-being” of their staff of 35,000. It was a heavy battery of charges. No civil servant in Britain has gone public against their minister quite this way.
Could Patel, as minister, have been threatening the health and safety of a staff of 35,000 through what Rutnam has described of her behaviour? That conduct would have to be extreme well beyond what the outgoing civil servant currently describes. And he has threatened to drag that into the light. He is due now to take Patel to court alleging constructive dismissal. A litany of nasty details is due to surface through the course of evidence presented and through witness statements that would be called in court. Rutnam said the cabinet office had offered him a financial settlement – in effect to take money and leave quietly. He opted instead for what will be a bloody, and dirty, fight in the court.
Patel without doubt brings quite a fireball of energy to the job. She is in a hurry – as mandated by Prime Minister Boris Johnson – to do things differently. That inevitably will lead to friction with the established bureaucracy set on doing things its old way. Whether this was the source of the conflict or any conduct of the kind Rutnam describes we will now see in court, but this conflict is set to extend well beyond the Home Office. Johnson has said the Foreign Office must now approach its task in radically different ways. The mandarins there are certain to resist a push to significantly if not unrecognisably different ways.
And then there is the elephant in the home office corridors no one is calling out by its name: is there a resistance to accepting an Indian-origin woman as the top boss? Many seem to see it, but no one’s prepared to say it. Away from all that, a decision of a court now will rest only on the evidence presented. We can be sure the English media will report every scrap of evidence presented against Patel.
Leading by example
Johnson predicted a baby boom in Britain come Brexit. The boom would come, he said, on the basis of a new optimism over Britain unshackled by the European Union. He is leading by example - he and fiancée Carrie Symonds are due to have a baby this summer that promises to be the most Brexit-y of all Brexit babies to be born.
Johnson and Carrie Symonds, who were privately engaged late last year, are expected to marry this year. This would be the third marriage for Johnson and the first by a British Prime Minister while in office for nearly 200 years. A baby in office isn’t that unusual any more. Recently both former prime ministers Tony Blair and David Cameron had babies while in office.
The announcement of this prime ministerial baby was perhaps not coincidental to that of the resignation of the topmost official in the Home Office after a string of accusations against Secretary Priti Patel; the good news around Johnson and Symonds did draw attention away from a serious crisis within the Home Office. There hasn’t been a day in a while were Britain needed to think more of happier matters at home than unhappy ones at the Home Office.
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