When a PM is in crisis, what do they do? Sack the head of the civil service. Having lost both his Chief of Staff and Director of Communications at the beginning of the week, Keir Starmer resolved to make it a hattrick by dispensing with the services of his short-serving Cabinet Secretary. Poor old Chris Wormald is on the way out – but it does not look like his intended replacement is going to be easy for Starmer either…
For Simon McDonald, the former Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, has now popped up in the news to warn No. 10 about plans to replace Wormald with Antonia Romeo without a new appointment process. He told Channel 4 last night that ditching Wormald is ‘extraordinary’ and he wants to talk to them about the Foreign Office investigation into allegations against Romeo in 2017 which the Cabinet Office said was investigated and dismissed without a case to answer.
Lord McDonald – whose intervention in the Chris Pincher scandal helped bring down Boris Johnson – insists that if Romeo is picked, ‘due diligence has some way to go’. Asked whether No. 10 should ‘go back to that process’, referring to the aforementioned investigation, he said:
Yes. I would prefer to go into detail with the team at No. 10 rather than your viewership, but yes. I am available to talk about that, and would like to do that. Sometimes appealing through the media is more effective than doing it direct, which I’ve tried to do, but they know how to get hold of me… I’ve been in touch today and not had a response.
Ouch. Talk of paedos, backroom clearout, perma-crisis and now Simon McDonald popping up. Mr S doesn’t know about you but it is all feeling very 2022…
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