International Development Secretary Priti Patel is facing calls to quit after failing to disclose 12 separate meetings with senior Israeli figures including PM Benjamin Netanyahu during what she claims was a family holiday.
Ministers, by convention, should tell the Foreign Office when they are conducting official business overseas. That she didn’t report the meetings - which took place over two days - has sparked fears that Patel used her “holiday”, in August, as a cover to surreptitiously discuss official UK government business with Israeli politicians and representatives of Israeli organisations. The BBC says that following the trip, Patel suggested that some of Britain’s aid budget go to the Israeli army.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Theresa May met Patel yesterday to “remind her of the obligations which exist under the ministerial code”, but accepted the minister’s apology for holding meetings in a way that “did not accord with the usual procedures”, says the Telegraph. Patel blamed her “enthusiasm to engage” for her failure to tell the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson about her high-level encounters, the Daily Mail adds.
May is calling for a tightening of the ministerial code of conduct, the BBC reports. But one Conservative MP told the Mail that the PM’s muted response indicates that May’s authority among her top team is “completely shot”.
According to the BBC, the revelation of the meetings left the British Consulate in Jerusalem feeling “blindsided” and “slightly bruised”.
The Netanyahu meeting included “prospects for closer collaboration between Israel and the UK on development and humanitarian issues”, Israel-based newspaper Haaretz reports, noting that no minutes were kept.
-
Political cartoons for January 29Cartoons Thursday's political cartoons include 2nd amendment dibs, disturbing news, and AI-inflated bills
-
The Flower Bearers: ‘a visceral depiction of violence, loss and emotional destruction’The Week Recommends Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ ‘open wound of a memoir’ is also a powerful ‘love story’ and a ‘portrait of sisterhood’
-
Steal: ‘glossy’ Amazon Prime thriller starring Sophie TurnerThe Week Recommends The Game of Thrones alumna dazzles as a ‘disillusioned twentysomething’ whose life takes a dramatic turn during a financial heist
-
How Iran protest death tolls have been politicisedIn the Spotlight Regime blames killing of ‘several thousand’ people on foreign actors and uses videos of bodies as ‘psychological warfare’ to scare protesters
-
The Board of Peace: Donald Trump’s ‘alternative to the UN’The Explainer Body set up to oversee reconstruction of Gaza could have broader mandate to mediate other conflicts and create a ‘US-dominated alternative to the UN’
-
The high street: Britain’s next political battleground?In the Spotlight Mass closure of shops and influx of organised crime are fuelling voter anger, and offer an opening for Reform UK
-
Israel’s E1 zone in the West Bank: the death of the two-state solution?The Explainer Controversial new settlement in occupied territories makes future Palestinian state unviable, critics claim
-
‘The security implications are harder still to dismiss’Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
-
What have Trump’s Mar-a-Lago summits achieved?Today’s big question Zelenskyy and Netanyahu meet the president in his Palm Beach ‘Winter White House’
-
What is the global intifada?The Explainer Police have arrested two people over controversial ‘globalise the intifada’ chants
-
The issue dividing Israel: ultra-Orthodox draft dodgersIn the Spotlight A new bill has solidified the community’s ‘draft evasion’ stance, with this issue becoming the country’s ‘greatest internal security threat’
