Patel is in a Priti pickle
Sympathy for Priti Patel is not necessarily widespread in Britain at the minute. The home secretary has incurred the wrath of the civil service, much of the establishment and
indeed much of the media for her
ripe language and uncompromising attitudes at work.
So much so that it has put her job — and political career — in jeopardy. To believe all the stories, she is an angry, impatient person whose desire to get the job done has gone beyond the acceptable.
But friends and former colleagues describe her as driven and hard-working, but also warm, kind and funny. It seems to me that she is as much victim as perpetrator in this overblown affair — victim of the greatest forces in modern political life: humbug, hypocrisy and hypersensitivity.
Of course, workplace bullying is a serious subject, is wholly unacceptable and is still sadly far too prevalent. Any allegation must be investigated, but we must also distinguish between claims of bullying and what constitutes firm management.
One of the allegations is that Patel called an official “f***ing useless.” Shocking stuff, indeed. Except that it isn’t. Not all that long ago I worked in a newsroom where the phrase “useless f***er” was a term of endearment.
The same is true of thousands of workplaces all over the land where people are trying to get things done to tight deadlines. So the media hitching up its collective cassock and tut-tutting like a shocked Victorian vicar is humbug of the first order.
Speaking of hypocrisy, the Labour party’s approach is extraordinary. Diane Abbott, in her best school governor tones, proposed that Patel should stand down as home secretary while the allegations were investigated.
Talk about shooting first and asking questions later. And this from the same Labour party still trying to crowbar John Bercow into the House of Lords, despite very similar bullying allegations hanging over his head.
If you pause for a moment, you might actually think Patel has a point. The Home Office’s recent track record suggests that it, and its senior team, is indeed “useless.” The Windrush debacle is only the biggest of the crises it has recently lurched into.
And the man who set the media storm off, Sir Philip Rutnam, is also hardly one to complain about criticism. He’s deserved plenty of it. Before he arrived to mismanage the Home Office he was doing the same at the Department for Transport, where he presided over a catastrophic rail franchising cock-up.
Yet when the blame came to be handed out he never seemed to take his portion. Frankly when Patel was appointed as home secretary, her first words to him should have been “you’re fired”.
If Patel has had failings they have been in management and communications. She is, or should be, running a turnaround at the Home Office and trying to rescue that organisation from chaos and inactivity.
As any turnaround chief executive will tell you, the first thing you need to do in these situations is pull the best team around you — people with experience, drive and flair — and not limp along with the old team. In terms of communications, Patel has said publicly she’s sorry that Rutnam has left.
She shouldn’t have. She should make it clear that it gives her a chance to put a team together who will tackle the job in hand. She should spell out to the voting public just how bad things are at the Home Office and what she is doing to fix them.
As for hypersensitivity? One wonders whether any criticism or ripe language is acceptable any longer. The last word though should perhaps belong to George Bernard Shaw: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress
depends on the unreasonable man.”
My sincere wish is that Patel keeps being unreasonable because Britain needs unreasonable people to chart its course as an independent nation, not least in the Home Office.
And let’s keep Rutnam out of harm’s way in future.
Neil Bennett is chief executive of PR firm Maitland/AMO
Main image: Getty