Another Labour scandal as Civil Service ethics team breaks into safe and shreds report on Antonia Romeo bullying

This disgrace only reinforces exactly what Rupert Lowe has been saying for months, the Civil Service needs reforming. It's just not fit for purpose.

In a jaw-dropping scandal that confirms every suspicion about Britain’s unaccountable Whitehall elite, the Cabinet Office’s own propriety and ethics team has been caught breaking into a safe to destroy a confidential 2017 bullying and expenses report on Dame Antonia Romeo, the woman Sir Keir Starmer just installed as the new head of the entire Civil Service.

The report, compiled after complaints from mostly female staff during Romeo’s time as consul-general in New York, found she had a case to answer on bullying and lavish spending including demands for $100,000 in redecoration and free paint from Farrow & Ball. Civil Service chiefs later dismissed the findings, but the file didn’t disappear quietly. In 2022, Darren Tierney a close ally of Romeo and then director-general of the standards watchdog ordered maintenance staff to force open the safe because he needed the document to help redact a critical memoir by Lord McDonald. Once inside, he shredded the Romeo file along with victim emails and other sensitive records.

The official denial? “This is entirely incorrect… This had nothing to do with any HR report or the cabinet secretary.” Unfortunately for them, a former senior civil servant called the three year destruction excuse extraordinary and laughable.

This is the same Civil Service that lectures the rest of us about ‘standards’ while protecting its own at all costs. Romeo’s rushed elevation to the most powerful unelected job in Britain just days after her predecessor was sacked with a six-figure payoff now looks less like complete incompetence by Starmer, again.

Starmer called her an outstanding public servant. The public sees a machine that hides its own scandals. Taxpayers even fund this circus. The public expects basic honesty. Instead we get safecracking and shredders in the ethics department. It’s time for serious change.

Rupert Lowe is right, the Civil Service needs dismantling

This disgrace only reinforces exactly what Rupert Lowe has been warning for months. The entire Civil Service needs dismantling.

Lowe has repeatedly declared that the bloated, self-serving bureaucracy is suffocating productive Britain and that nothing short of radical surgery by slashing headcount, stripping away layers of talkers and box-tickers, and restoring real power to elected ministers. Events like the Romeo safe job prove his point, this is not a reformable institution. It is a protection racket operating above democracy.

Until the whole rotten structure is taken apart and rebuilt from the ground up, scandals like this will keep happening and the British people will keep paying the price. Lowe is right. The time for tinkering is over. Dismantle it.