The Most Powerful Person in Britain

A woman called Antonia Romeo (pronounced like the car) isn’t just the most powerful woman in the United Kingdom (UK) today, but the country’s most powerful individual. News of her appointment as Cabinet Secretary is being promoted as a near-impossible accomplishment in girl-boss history; the truth is more troubling.

In the last five years the idea that elected officials in the UK, including the Prime Minister, call the shots has been defenestrated, at some points humiliatingly, at others arbitrarily. The most obvious example was the UK’s response to Covid, but there are other examples, including the present Chagos Archipelago giveaway crisis. While most weren’t noticing, the civil service wrestled control of the actual levers of political power in the country; while the theory of a shadow foundation contradicts all democratic prescripts, tradition, – and say nothing of confidence – what makes it worse in the UK’s case is that many of these people possess an unflattering if not openly hostile view of politics.

Romeo appears to be one of these individuals. Until recently she was permanent secretary at the Home Office, the organ of state charged with security and deciding who comes into the country. Measuring her performance on the latter puts her in the crosshairs of the UK’s nascent nativist movement enraged by decades of near-open border policies they have consistently voted against. These quarters aren’t alone in their concern at her appointment.

Remarkable story

Gabriel Pogrund is one of the UK’s finest journalists, and the co-author of two excellent books about the Labour Party. Over the weekend, Pogrund broke a remarkable story about Romeo in The Sunday Times.

Romeo previously held a diplomatic position in New York. Her role involved promoting British trade and culture in the United States, including high-profile events, but she was unpopular, and drew complaints from almost half of the consular staff.

The primary issue was bullying. Former colleagues described a “reign of terror” involving screaming, yelling, threats to destroy careers, and demeaning slurs such as calling staff “liars,” or “bitches”. A 2017 staff survey recorded 47% of New York consulate employees experiencing bullying. A dossier of complaints from multiple staff (mostly women) was sent to London where a man called Sir Tim Hitchens was tasked with investigating. Sir Tim found a “serious case to answer” and delivered his report to the Cabinet Office.

Expenses and redecoration also sparked outrage and prompted disbelief. Romeo sought more than $100 000 to repaint her official Manhattan residence with Farrow & Ball paint (initially vetoed, then allegedly pursued via free sponsorships from UK firms). Other claims allegedly included children’s private school fees, storage costs, and travel. Staff criticised her for pressuring companies for free luxury items and extravagant celebrity parties, which some saw as prioritising her profile over UK trade goals.

Self-promotion compounded tensions. Colleagues accused her of obsessing over her personal brand on social media and demanding framed Vogue and New Yorker articles featuring her be hung in the residence bathroom so “regardless of how you use the bathroom, you have to stare at a photo of her.”

Last Sunday Pogrund reported that in 2022, a safe in the Cabinet Office had been broken into, a scandal not reported at the time. It housed the dossier containing Sir Tim’s investigation into Romeo. Those documents were seized and are presumed to have been destroyed.

Unelected

How do these unelected people operate? An example emerges from some academic literature published last year by Geoffrey Sloan, entitled Seeking Success and Confronting Failure: The British Army’sCampaigns in Ireland and Northern Ireland, 1919–2007 .

It is the year 1997 and frantic talks are going on between Tony Blair’s administration and Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army. Blair has (apparently secretly) instructed his chief of staff, a shadowy figure called Jonathan Powell, to parachute himself into the group’s confidence. Technically this would only be an issue were Powell to object on the basis of the terrorists’ commitment to and record of harming innocent civilians in its campaigns, but Powell doesn’t appear especially bothered.

The sentiment within the UK Armed Forces is different. At the time a Royal Ulster Constabulary surveillance is tracking one Siobhan O’Hanlon, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams’ personal assistant who had been suspected of planning an attack on Gibraltar. The unit is trailing O’Hanlon’s vehicle to the airport; from the terminal emerges Jonathan Powell, who gets into the car and they drive off together. He has flown commercial.

For the army, it is a bewildering spectacle, but for Blair and many of his supporters, the end – the drafting of the Good Friday Agreement the following year – justifies the means. This is how things get done.

When Keir Starmer was elected, he made Jonathan Powell his national security adviser. One of Powell’s first jobs involved handing the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius, now obviously a case of government being done by people who hate government or refuse to adhere to its norms.

Complication

Antonia Romeo knows how to complicate stuff. In addition to damaging the morale of the New York consulate, there was her behaviour in 2020 where she, as one of the two most senior civil servants at the Department for International Trade (DIT), circulated a department-wide memo stating that “the protests alongside the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on minority communities highlight how much more work there is still to do to achieve genuine equality”, and later hosted a Black Lives Matter discussion opened to all DIT staff where she explicitly urged colleagues to join the department’s “Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) Allies” group. For all this, she was described last year as Whitehall’s “Queen of Woke”.

Before visiting the past, the appointment must be examined in the context of the present and the future. It happens at a time where the King’s brother and Jonathan Powell’s former colleague Peter Mandelson have been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in office in relation to Jeffrey Epstein, and where a Labour-orchestrated smear campaign targeting independent journalists has been exposed. The architect of this campaign is said to have been Starmer’s former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, but the question is whether Starmer knew. How could he not have?

Like Powell, Romeo doesn’t appear to like politics, but she doesn’t necessarily need to: she buries, distracts, evades, suffocates, and enforces – exactly the types of things Keir Starmer thinks he needs. For him, he may have made the correct decision, but for Romeo, whether her appointment will deliver the final admission that UK democracy is just performative theatrics is unlikely something that keeps her awake.