The Record Nobody Wants to Explain

How Antonia Romeo Became the Most Powerful Civil Servant in the Country

Antonia Romeo is the most powerful civil servant in the United Kingdom. She was appointed Cabinet Secretary by Keir Starmer in February 2026. She is the first woman to hold the role. What follows is the record of how she got there.

In 2016 and 2017, while serving as consul-general in New York, Romeo became the subject of complaints from several colleagues regarding her conduct. The allegations, compiled into a single formal complaint, were specific. Romeo was said to have told a junior member of staff that refusing to comply with a particular request was a "career-limiting move" and "would only happen once." Another colleague who disagreed with her was told Romeo "would make sure their reputation and career in London suffered." A third described her as "very demanding, very disrespectful, very threatening." That was one person's account. Others said worse.

Staff also alleged she ordered them to frame articles about her from Vogue and the New Yorker and display them throughout the bathroom of the official residence, positioned so that "regardless of how you use the bathroom, you have to stare at a photo of her in a magazine spread staring back at you."

One email said that "Antonia's obsession with promoting her personal brand over the work and priorities of HMG has created an untenably tense and bullying atmosphere for all staff." Another colleague wrote that she appeared to be "focusing an undue amount on building her personal Twitter brand." A contemporaneous account put it plainly. "She's a diplomat, not a D-list celebrity. My 15-year-old, social-media-obsessed brother is less shameless in her self-promotion."

“Her office was like something out of Black Mirror,” recalls a young official of her first trip to see the woman now leading Britain’s civil service.

Wherever she looked in Antonia Romeo’s old sanctum at the Department for International Trade, Romeo’s face smiled back. “It was covered in pictures of her with famous people,” the footballer David Beckham among them, the official recalled. “I couldn’t concentrate on the meeting, because I was just looking at the wall thinking, ‘is that Imelda Staunton?’”

An annual staff survey covering the period recorded that 47 per cent of New York staff said they had experienced bullying in the workplace, the highest level ever recorded anywhere in the Foreign Office. In most government departments, the figure sits in the low single figures.

The complaint also covered her financial conduct. Romeo had arranged for Farrow & Ball to provide more than $100,000 worth of paint to redecorate the official residence in return for free publicity. A separate claim of $250 covered a taxi to a football match.

The complaints went to the Foreign Office. The Foreign Office commissioned a formal investigation and concluded Romeo had a serious case to answer. The sequence of events that happened next are extraordinary.

Overturned

Sir Tim Hitchens, a former British ambassador to Japan, was flown to New York to conduct the inquiry. During that process some witnesses retracted their statements after being told the original report would be shared with Romeo. The final report was understood to be much weaker than what Hitchens had originally compiled.

Despite the withdrawn statements, Hitchens still concluded there was a serious case to answer on Romeo's management behaviour towards staff.

The Cabinet Office overturned the management finding anyway. It had not conducted its own investigation. As a source told The Times: "The Foreign Office did a full investigation and found a serious case to answer which the Cabinet Office then ignored. So how did they reach that conclusion when they did not do their own investigation?"

Nothing Stopped Her

Romeo became Permanent Secretary at the Department for International Trade in 2017. Four years later she moved to the Ministry of Justice. By April 2025 she was running the Home Office.

She had been linked to the top job twice before. Sir Mark Sedwill's departure in 2020 created the vacancy. Romeo was widely discussed as a potential successor but the job went to Simon Case in what was widely described as a surprise appointment. Case left on grounds of ill health in late 2024. Romeo was formally shortlisted as one of four candidates but the job went to Sir Chris Wormald. It is the vetting conducted during one of those processes, the government has not specified which, that Downing Street cited as sufficient grounds to bypass a full fresh process in 2026.

The Money. The Flights. The Cover-Up.

The investigation file did not disappear.

Romeo had been announced as Permanent Secretary of the Department for International Trade in January 2017 and formally took up the role in March. Between April and July, after she had already started the London role, she claimed more than £31,000 in travel and accommodation costs, including a series of 7,000-mile flights, some in business class, to visit her family who were still living in New York. A Mail on Sunday report published in December 2017 put those figures into the public domain.

Only after the story broke did Romeo repay some of the money. The government says the claims were made under an agreed arrangement. She did not repay a penny until the newspaper published the figures.

In 2020, the same newspaper returned. It reported that Romeo had taken a last-minute flight to London in February 2017, still technically serving as consul-general in New York, the month before she formally took up the DIT role, and had attended the BAFTAs during that trip.

She was a British diplomat on a New York posting. What official purpose was served by attending a film awards ceremony in London?

No answer to that question has ever been placed on the public record. The government reached back into the 2017 investigation file to respond to the renewed press interest. Three years on, the document was still being used to guide official statements.

One Man Refused to Let It Go

By 2022, the file was stored in a secure safe inside the Cabinet Office. It held the Hitchens report, complainant emails, witness statements, and the internal correspondence explaining how the serious case to answer finding had been overturned.

Hitchens had submitted his original report to Lord McDonald of Salford, then Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Romeo's most senior boss. McDonald used that knowledge to block Romeo from a senior diplomatic appointment in 2019. In 2022 he was preparing to publish his memoir, Leadership: Lessons from a Life in Diplomacy. Under the Radcliffe Rules, former senior officials must submit draft manuscripts to the Cabinet Office before publication. His draft reportedly contained an anonymised account of a "senior colleague" widely understood to be Romeo, described the investigation's findings as severe, and recounted blocking the 2019 appointment.

In February 2026, McDonald appeared on Channel 4 News. Due diligence, he said, was "vitally important." The Prime Minister had "recent bitter experience" of conducting it too late. He called for the recruitment process to start from scratch.

McDonald received the Hitchens report in 2017. He blocked her promotion in 2019. He tried to publish his account in 2022. He went on television in 2026. He was doing everything short of taking out a billboard.

They Broke Into the Safe

Darren Tierney, then Director-General of the Propriety and Ethics team, reportedly said he required access to the 2017 investigation file to assess whether McDonald's manuscript complied with the Radcliffe Rules. The file was inside the secure safe. Tierney instructed maintenance staff to force it open, later stating that he could not locate the code and urgently required access to the file.

The Cabinet Office separately stated: "A broken safe was manually opened after multiple unsuccessful attempts to open it. This had nothing to do with any HR report or the cabinet secretary."

A Denial That Proves Nothing

That wording is limited. It does not deny the file was accessed or that it was inside the safe. It states only that opening the safe "had nothing to do with" any HR report.

If the safe was forced open to retrieve the investigation file, the statement is false. If it was opened for unrelated mechanical reasons, somebody still needs to explain how the file ended up being accessed and destroyed in the same episode. The Cabinet Office has not explained that.

Then the Evidence Disappeared

Once the safe was opened the investigation file was destroyed. Reporting indicates the destruction went beyond the report itself to include complainant emails and the documentation explaining how the serious case to answer finding had been overturned. Other historic standards files were also disposed of.

The internal explanation was that HR guidance required files to be destroyed after three years. By 2022 the file was approximately five years old. It had survived past the retention deadline, been pulled out in 2020 when the press came calling, been locked in a secure safe, been retrieved during a live manuscript review, and then been destroyed.

She Got the Job Anyway

In February 2026, Antonia Romeo was appointed Cabinet Secretary. Three of the original complainants had contacted the Cabinet Office in the weeks before to raise concerns. Lord McDonald had gone on national television to warn the Prime Minister that due diligence was "vitally important" and that he had "recent bitter experience" of conducting it too late. Downing Street proceeded regardless, citing vetting conducted on a previous occasion. The Civil Service Commissioner, Baroness Gisela Stuart, confirmed the full process did not need to be re-run.

Starmer appointed Lord Mandelson as US Ambassador despite knowing about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. He handed a peerage to a former spin chief despite reports that man had campaigned for a sex offender. The pattern is the same. The question is the same. Why did he go ahead? With Romeo, nobody has put that directly to him. It needs to be put.

Reform Is Watching

Reform UK is currently leading in the polls. On some models they are projected to win a majority at the next election. They have made the permanent secretary class a central target. Their own policy document describes the civil service as "in places ideologically hostile to what a Reform government will want to do."

Danny Kruger, the man Reform has put in charge of preparing for government, said in December 2025: "We're never going to outnumber them, but we can outsmart them. And what we can certainly do is outgun them." A Reform government would replace permanent secretaries with outsiders and give ministers the authority to appoint and dismiss those who advise them. Civil servants have reportedly discussed quitting en masse if Reform wins. At Kent County Council, which Reform now controls, they have already warned officers that obstructing their review team will be treated as gross misconduct.

The argument Reform will make is simple. Labour appointed the most powerful civil servant in the country through a process that bypassed open competition, destroyed its own paperwork, and went ahead despite formal objections from three complainants and a former Permanent Secretary who went on television. If that is how the current government makes appointments at the top of the civil service, Reform will say, then civil service independence is already a fiction. Why preserve a convention that the other side abandoned?

That argument is now available to them. Labour made it available. Every permanent secretary in the country is now fractionally more exposed because the government demonstrated that the appointment process can be compressed, the record can disappear, and the warnings can be ignored. Reform did not need to invent a justification for clearing out the senior civil service. Starmer provided one.

The public are entitled to a direct answer to one question. Should Reform win the next election, will she be removed as Cabinet Secretary? Nobody has put that to them. It needs to be put.

That question, why Starmer went ahead, also has not been answered.

What Did Starmer Know?

Starmer made his decision four years after the Cabinet Office copy of the investigation was destroyed. The passage of time changes nothing about what was in that file, who destroyed it, or why the Cabinet Office overturned a finding it never investigated.

The witnesses withdrew before Hitchens filed his report and he still found a serious case to answer. The Cabinet Office overturned that finding without running a single interview of its own. The file survived for five years, was used by the government in 2020, was locked in a safe, and was then destroyed while a former Permanent Secretary was trying to publish an account of what it contained. Starmer appointed Romeo knowing all of this was in the public domain.

What he may not have seen is the actual paperwork.

• Did he read the original Hitchens report?
• Did he see the written reasoning the Cabinet Office used to overturn it?
• Was he told the copy had been destroyed in 2022?
• Were those documents available to whoever briefed him, or had they already gone?

If Starmer saw everything and went ahead anyway, that is a political decision he should be made to defend in public. If the briefing showed only the "no case to answer" conclusion and said nothing about the destroyed file, the people who prepared it have questions to answer.

The government says Romeo was previously vetted and the full process did not need to be re-run. The file was destroyed in 2022. Vetting conducted in 2024 rested on a file that was already gone. Vetting conducted in 2020 predates McDonald's memoir attempt, the forced entry, and the destruction entirely. The government has not said which round it is relying on. Until it does the claim means nothing.

One of the original complainants told the Guardian the appointment was "another example of poor judgment, and the elevation of those with questionable integrity despite the concerns raised by ordinary people." Another said the people Romeo bullied "will now feel failed for a second time." A third said the government was "taking shortcuts" based on "special treatment instead of merit."

These were not people briefing against a colleague. They were people who made formal complaints nine years ago, watched the file get destroyed, and then watched her get the top job.

The Questions

The government has answers to all of these. It has either chosen not to give them or has not been pressed hard enough to do so. The Conservatives will not ask them. Romeo held three Permanent Secretary roles on their watch. Reform have already confirmed their position on the permanent secretary class. So the question is whether they have the courage to put the following directly to the government.

On the 2017 investigation and its reversal

• Who authorised the decision to overturn the serious case to answer finding?
• What written reasoning justified that decision?
• The Cabinet Office conducted no investigation of its own. On what basis did it override an independent investigator's determination?
• Does the full documentary explanation still exist?

On the 2022 forced entry and file destruction

• What was the precise operational reason for forcing open the secure Cabinet Office safe?
• Was access to the Romeo investigation file the trigger for that action?
• Who authorised the destruction of the investigation file, and was that decision formally recorded?
• Were complainant emails and internal reversal documentation destroyed under the same instruction?
• Do maintenance logs and internal access records establish the exact sequence of events?

On the 2026 appointment

• Did the Prime Minister personally review the original Hitchens report, including the serious case to answer finding?
• Was he told that the Cabinet Office copy of the file had been destroyed in 2022?
• Were complete copies of the investigation and the reversal documentation available during the appointment process, and if not, what documentary record formed the basis of the decision?
• Which specific round of prior vetting is the government relying on, 2020 or 2024?
• If 2024, how was it conducted after the file had already been destroyed?
• If 2020, that process was completed before McDonald's memoir attempt, the forced entry, and the destruction of the file. The record had changed. On what basis was vetting from either year considered sufficient?

On process

• Was the appointment fast-tracked?
• Was a full competitive process conducted?
• Was the Civil Service Commission engaged in the usual manner?
• Was the serious case to answer finding examined as part of vetting?

The government has the answers to every one of these questions. It has documentary records, internal correspondence, maintenance logs, vetting files, and the written reasoning, if it still exists, that justified overturning a finding an independent investigator reached without conducting a single interview of their own. None of that information has been placed in the public domain. Some of it may no longer exist. The government has not explained which.

Still No Answer

What this country now has is a Cabinet Secretary whose appointment nobody in government will fully explain. The file that documented what happened in New York no longer exists. The vetting the government is citing was conducted either before the file was destroyed or after it was already partially gone. Neither version holds up.

The people who raised concerns put their names to specific allegations in writing in 2017. They contacted the Cabinet Office again in the weeks before this appointment was confirmed. They have received no adequate response at any point across nine years.

McDonald blocked her promotion in 2019. He tried to place his account on the public record in 2022. The file was accessed and destroyed during that process. He went on national television when every other avenue had been exhausted. Government sources called him a senior male official whose time had passed.

The complainants were told there was no case to answer. The file that recorded a different conclusion is gone. Antonia Romeo runs the civil service.

Starmer has not said whether he saw the original Hitchens finding before he made this decision. He has not said what he knew about the destroyed file. He has not identified which round of vetting he is relying on or explained what that vetting could have established once the central documents were gone. His office described her as an outstanding public servant with a 25-year record. That description does not address a single concern raised.

The people who made these complaints are still waiting. They have waited nine years. They are owed a direct answer from the man who gave her the job. Starmer answered for Mandelson. The country laughed. He appointed Romeo anyway. At some point the pattern stops being coincidence.

What we have now is a Prime Minister who has demonstrated, twice, that warnings from credible sources will not change his mind. A Cabinet Secretary whose appointment rests on a file that no longer exists. A civil service whose most senior figure got the job through a process that nobody in government will put their name to and fully defend in public.

The complainants are not abstractions. They are civil servants who raised concerns about a colleague's conduct, put their names to it, and spent nine years watching the institution protect itself rather than answer them. They watched the investigation get overturned. They watched the file get destroyed. They watched her get promoted three times. Then they watched her get the top job.

If Keir Starmer believes this appointment was made properly, he should say so, in full, on the record, and explain the basis for that belief. He has not done that. Why?

If you’re new here, my name is Raja Miah MBE. For the past seven years, I’ve led the campaign that exposed how Labour politicians protected Pakistani Rape Gangs. You won’t see me on TV or in the mainstream press - that’s not by accident. The machine we’re up against doesn’t want the truth out.

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