IN his resignation statement, the former Permanent Secretary of the UK Home Office says he does not believe Priti Patel. Who can blame him when her record on mendacity is on a par with that of the UK Prime Minister and so many of their Cabinet colleagues?
We all remember that Patel resigned from her previous post as International Development Secretary in November 2017 for breaking the ministerial code of conduct by holding unauthorised meetings with the Israeli Prime Minister and others when she was on holiday in Israel. There was much obfuscation at the time over whether the code was clear on the matter. It was, and she should have been sacked rather than allowed to resign.
READ MORE: Top Home Office civil servant Philip Rutnam resigns from role
Nevertheless, the obfuscation served to distract from the fact that in her initial response to the story Patel talked of a handful of meetings and said Boris Johnson, then Foreign Secretary, had known in advance about them. It was only a matter of days before she was “clarifying her position” and admitting to a “lack of precision” for suggesting he had known about the meetings and confessing to 12 meetings rather than a handful.
Gavin Brown
Linlithgow
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