Boris Johnson’s partner Carrie Symonds hires
communications adviser
The salary will be paid by the Conservatives, not the
taxpayer.
By CHARLIE
COOPER 2/28/20, 8:00 AM CET
LONDON —
Carrie Symonds, the partner of U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, has hired a
communications specialist as a personal adviser.
Sarah
Vaughan-Brown, whose previous roles include director of communications for the
broadcaster ITN and head of public relations for the Trinity Mirror newspaper
group, began working for Symonds earlier this month.
Vaughan-Brown's
salary will be paid by the Conservative party, not the taxpayer, party
officials said.
The
arrangement appears designed to avoid criticisms that were leveled at former
Prime Minister David Cameron when it was reported that an aide to his wife,
Samantha, was being paid from the public purse.
Party
officials indicated Vaughan-Brown's role will see her assist Symonds's
charitable work in special areas of interest — the environment and animal
cruelty, combating violence against women and supporting the armed forces.
Symonds — herself a former Conservative party director of communications — is
also employed by the Oceana charity, where she has worked with Mike Bloomberg's
philanthropic foundation on its "Vibrant Oceans" project.
While
Symonds has been the subject of several media reports regarding her influence
in Downing Street and alleged clashes with Dominic Cummings, Johnson's most
senior adviser, she has kept a low public profile since moving into No. 10 last
summer.
Before heading
up the Conservatives' communications operation for a year in the wake of the
2017 general election, Symonds worked as a special adviser to Cabinet ministers
John Whittingdale and Sajid Javid, the latter of whom recently resigned from
his post as Johnson's chancellor.
Vaughan-Brown
spent more than 10 years at ITN, departing last summer when she founded her own
company SVB Communications. Prior to that she spent eight years at Trinity
Mirror (now known as Reach plc), publisher of the Daily Mirror newspaper. She
is described in former Mirror Editor Piers Morgan's memoir "The Insider:
The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade" as "our star PR" and
the book recalls her work promoting the left-leaning paper's scoops on the
royal family, and her role in arranging for Daily Mirror banners to be
displayed at the 2003 London protest march against the Iraq War.
Authors:
Charlie Cooper
Sir Simon
McDonald, one of the senior civil servants said to be on No 10’s least-wanted
list.
While Dominic Cummings fiddles, the civil service
burns
Jane Dudman
Government hitlist of senior Whitehall staff distracts
from the toxic bullying culture facing many civil servants
@JaneDudman1
Email
Fri 28 Feb
2020 08.13 GMTLast modified on Fri 28 Feb 2020 12.49 GMT
Last March,
when Philip Rycroft left his job as the most senior civil servant in the
Department for Exiting the EU, his detox from the stress was drastic. He and
his wife spent two weeks on a remote Scottish island with no mobile phone
reception at all.
A bit
extreme, acknowledges Rycroft, but this act of self-isolation was a huge relief
after the intense activity of trying to prepare the UK for Brexit. As part of
his job, Rycroft came under intense political and personal pressure, as did
other senior civil servants, including then Brexit chief negotiator Ollie
Robbins.
But looking
back, Rycroft and Robbins were practically living in halcyon days compared with
the atmosphere that’s pervaded the civil service since Boris Johnson became
prime minister last July. This week has seen reports that three senior civil
servants are on a No 10 hitlist: Sir Tom Scholar at the Treasury, because the
department has been opposed to Brexit; Sir Philip Rutnam at the Home Office,
because he is seen as obstructive; and |Sir Simon McDonald at the Foreign
Office, because he fell out with Johnson when he was foreign secretary.
The plans
to remove senior civil servants from key departments has resulted in a
“poisonous” atmosphere across Whitehall, according to union leaders. But it’s
actually more dangerous even than that.
The management
manual has yet to be written that recommends alienating thousands of
hardworking staff on whom the organisation relies to get its everyday work
done. But this shoddy tactic is one that is eagerly taken up by many incoming
governments keen to embark on their policies and nervous that the civil service
will somehow be a blocker, despite all the evidence on how effectively it
carries out the work of the elected government of the day.
No 10
adviser Dominic Cummings has made no secret of his belief that a permanent
civil service should be consigned to the history books. Less clear, however, is
how he thinks government policies would then be executed, particularly given
his own poor record so far on hiring and the fact that Whitehall is having to
appoint a new HR chief to oversee policy in dealing with special advisers,
following Cummings’s own treatment of spads.
More
worrying, though, is the rise and rise of bullying at all levels of the civil
service. Accusations about Priti Patel’s behaviour towards officials at the
Home Office have led to other department heads having to reassure their own
staff. Matthew Rycroft, the top civil servant at the Department for
International Development, has written to his staff to reassure them that the
ministry has “zero tolerance” of bullying and harassment in the wake of reports
about Patel.
Bullying
isn’t just coming from ministers. There have been long-term problems of
bullying in many civil service departments for years. The most recent, shocking
case came to a head this week as former Department of Work and Pensions trainee
Anne Giwa-Amu was awarded almost £400,000 after having been singled out and
humiliated by colleagues, who violated her dignity through the use of racist
language.
A bullying
culture, from top to bottom, is clearly no way to run the country. Senior civil
servants may be under threat, but they also need to consider the morale of the
departments they run.
.jpeg)
