UK minister faces sacking calls over Israel meetings

LONDON — British Prime Minister Theresa May summoned her aid minister back from a trip to Africa yesterday following a row over unauthorized meetings in Israel, prompting speculation she will be the second minister in a week to be sacked.

International Development Secretary Priti Patel left London on Tuesday on a trip to Uganda, but a government source told AFP she was returning to London yesterday at May's request.

Patel was forced to apologize on Monday for taking time out of a family holiday to Israel in August to hold 12 separate meetings with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other politicians without May's knowledge.

Patel was accompanied on all the meetings in Israel except one by Lord Stuart Polak, the honorary president of lobbying group Conservative Friends of Israel.

She was publicly reprimanded by the prime minister but appeared to keep her job.

However, it emerged late Tuesday there had been another two unauthorized meetings in September, one with Israel's Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan.

"I don't understand what more she needs to do to be sacked," one unnamed minister told the Daily Telegraph newspaper.

If sacked, Patel would become the second minister to leave May's government in a week, after Michael Fallon quit on November 1 in a scandal over sexual harassment and sleaze that has rocked parliament.

A third cabinet minister, May's de facto deputy Damian Green, is under investigation for allegedly touching a journalist's knee in 2014 and for having "extreme pornography" on his parliamentary computer a decade ago.

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has also been heavily criticized for remarks which left him accused of jeopardizing the case of a British-Iranian woman jailed in Tehran.

The main opposition Labour party has demanded an investigation into whether Patel's behavior breached the ministerial code.