Daily Mail

Overweenin­g ambition that may crush her

- Andrew Pierce reporting

PRITI Patel represents in many ways the very best of the Conservati­ve Party tradition at Westminste­r. Her Ugandan Asian family arrived penniless in Britain in 1972 having fled tyrant Idi Amin.

They left behind a fortune tied up in tea, cotton and coffee plantation­s and moved into a small rented house in north London. Aware of the imperative of making a living in such circumstan­ces, Patel’s father Sushil abandoned plans to go to university and set up a corner shop in Tottenham with his wife Anjana.

Over the next 40 years, Patel’s parents were up at 3.30am seven days a week sorting newspapers and getting ready for the day.

Like her political heroine Margaret Thatcher – who was famously the daughter of a grocer in Grantham, Lincolnshi­re – Priti Patel lived above the shop.

As with so many successful Asian immigrants, her parents soon had a string of shops, and in an interview not long after she became the MP for Witham in Essex in 2010, Patel, who joined the Tories at 17, said her political journey was inspired by their example.

But recently things have gone horribly wrong for the comprehens­ive-educated high-flyer, who was once seen as a strong contender to be the first Asian leader of a British political party.

Her tenure as Internatio­nal Developmen­t Secretary has been a crushing disappoint­ment – and now over-weeningly ambitious Patel is struggling for survival after a highly controvers­ial holiday in Israel. Indeed, if Mrs May were not so weakened by the General Election result and party division, Patel would already have gone from the Cabinet.

Many at Westminste­r believe it was her ambition to succeed Mrs May that was behind what happened in Israel.

They claim she turned what was supposed to be a private family holiday into a high-powered diplomatic mission to raise her profile, as well as potential funds for a leadership contest.

In the space of a few days she met no fewer than 12 senior Israeli figures, including prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, without informing her own department, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson or Downing Street – which would almost certainly have blocked the meetings. To make matters worse, she was accompanie­d by Lord Polak who for three decades has been the driving force behind Conservati­ve Friends of Israel, which has given around £400,000 to Tory funds in the past ten years.

To be fair to Patel, she never attempted to keep her activities a secret as she tweeted photos from some of the meetings. Yet in Westminste­r there was disbelief that she could have so brazenly strayed into the Foreign Secretary’s territory.

On her return, she compounded her errors when she demanded that her own department change its aid guidelines to give money to the Israeli army for the first time, to do humanitari­an work in the Golan Heights. No one can know for certain what Patel discussed with the Israeli prime minister because there was not a single UK government official in the room to keep minutes. The only account of the meeting is her own. Worse still, she claimed Boris Johnson ‘knew all about it’, which wasn’t true.

As Opposition MPs bayed for her blood yesterday, Patel was on a plane to Africa with Internatio­nal Trade Secretary Liam Fox, safely out of harm’s way. For now.

BUT the unsavoury episode will bring unwelcome attention to her woeful record as Internatio­nal Developmen­t Secretary. In the summer a National Audit Office ( NAO) report showed money was being wasted because civil servants were struggling to hit the legal requiremen­t of spending 0.7 per cent of the nation’s income on overseas aid.

And an analysis of more than 70,000 financial transactio­ns revealed recently that spending on consultant­s by her department had doubled to a staggering £1billion a year since 2012.

Ten British companies received almost half of the funds. One British think-tank quoted £10,306 to write a single blog post and another received £23,000 in taxpayers’ money to write a two-page policy brief. Two consultant­s were separately handed £12,000 to produce a six-page ‘how-to’ note on disaster resilience.

A Tory source said: ‘ We really thought with Priti there this waste would be eradicated, but it’s got worse. Maybe if she spent less time plotting for another job she could get a grip on the department.’

But Patel will not be told. At the Tory conference last month, stage staff placed a step behind the lectern to give the diminutive MP a height-boost for her speech. She opened by saying: ‘ Some of our most successful leaders have of course been the smallest.’

In the speech she used the word ‘I’ no fewer than 33 times. Only the Prime Minister, who she conspicuou­sly omitted to mention, used the word more than Patel.

But she did mention Lady Thatcher. ‘I met her many, many times and I had a great bond with her. She was very, very kind to me. She helped me raise funds and get started in my constituen­cy. There’s no doubt, with our similar background­s, there was a common interest.’

Maybe so. But Margaret Thatcher would never have made such a crass mistake as meeting a foreign prime minister on holiday without having secured permission. It’s a mistake that almost certainly scuppers any hope Patel that will follow her heroine into 10 Downing Street.

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