In hot water over off-the-book meetings with foreign officials, Britain’s senior-most Indian-origin minister Priti Patel has resigned from her Cabinet post over her unauthorised secret meetings with Israeli politicians while on a holiday in the Jewish country.
Patel’s position as international development minister had become increasingly untenable after it emerged that she had two further meetings with Israeli officials that were not disclosed through the proper procedure, PTI reported.
The 45-year-old minister resigned late last night after a meeting at Downing Street with Prime Minister Theresa May.
In her resignation, Patel again apologised and said her actions “fell below the standards of transparency and openness that I have promoted and advocated”. It follows a week of controversies around a dozen undisclosed meetings she had with other Israelis, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for which she had been forced to apologise.
Her departure from the Cabinet marks an abrupt halt to the meteoric rise of the Gujarati-origin MP, often touted as a potential future leader of the Conservative party and a prime ministerial candidate.
She was elected as a Conservative MP for Witham in Essex in 2010 and gained prominence in the then David Cameron-led Tory government as his ‘Indian Diaspora Champion’.
She went on to be appointed to junior ministerial posts, treasury minister in 2014 and then employment minister after the 2015 General Election, before May promoted her to secretary of state in the Department for International Development (DfID) last year.
A longstanding Eurosceptic, Patel is among the most vocal supporters of Brexit and had steered the ‘Vote Leave’ campaign in the lead up to the June 2016 referendum in favour of Britain’s exit from the European Union (EU).
She was recalled from an official tour of Uganda and Ethiopia and ordered to abandon the visit and fly back to London today “at the request of the prime minister”.
Earlier this week, Downing Street had said that May had accepted Patel’s apology over a series of meetings while she was on holiday in Israel in August without reporting them to the Foreign Office. But new revelations of further meetings with Israeli officials following that visit had made Patel’s position within the Cabinet very precarious.
It is understood that she met Israel’s public security minister Gilad Erdan in the UK Parliament complex in early September and an Israeli Foreign Ministry official Yuval Rotem in New York later that month.
The British Premier was reportedly told about the unreported New York meeting during Patel’s apology conversation at Downing Street on Monday but only learned about her unreported meeting with Erdan after the talks.
Ministers are required to tell the UK Foreign Office when they are conducting official business overseas, but it emerged that British diplomats in Israel were not informed about any of Patel’s meetings – which included a meeting with Netanyahu and other political figures as well as charity organisations.
Opposition parties had been calling for Patel’s resignation as minister in charge of DfID and the country’s aid budget if it emerged that she had breached the ministerial code of conduct and failed to follow established protocol.
In a letter to May, Labour’s shadow Cabinet Office minister Jon Trickett had called on the premier to either call in her independent adviser on ministerial standards to investigate, or “state publicly and explain your full reasons for why Priti Patel retains your confidence”.
In her apology statement on Monday, Patel had attributed the unreported meetings to “enthusiasm”.
“In hindsight, I can see how my enthusiasm to engage in this way could be misread, and how meetings were set up and reported in a way which did not accord with the usual procedures. I am sorry for this and I apologise for it,” she said.
Her conduct had already led May to direct her Cabinet Office to look into tightening the ministerial code of conduct to avoid any such incidents in future.
