25,000 track her flight
‘WHERE is she?’ demanded MPs when Priti Patel was summoned to the Commons on Tuesday afternoon to explain her extraordinary summer holiday in Israel.
‘She is currently in the air,’ replied her deputy Alistair Burt as he began the delicate task of explaining why his boss had held 12 unauthorised meetings with Israeli officials – including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – during a ‘family holiday’ in August.
Twenty four hours later, the whole world knew exactly where Miss Patel was: rolling news channels were broadcasting live footage of a website showing the progress of a Kenya Airways flight from Nairobi as she returned to London to face the end of her ministerial career.
At one point almost 25,000 people had logged on to the Flightradar24 airline tracking website to follow the progress of Flight KQ100 as Miss Patel made the eight-and-a-half-hour journey home. Shortly after 3pm, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner landed and grainy footage showed the diminutive international develop- ment secretary leaving the jet. Miss Patel was still afforded a VIP greeting at a rainy Heathrow, however.
While her fellow passengers headed for passport control and baggage reclaim, she was given an umbrella escort to a waiting courtesy car. This whisked her to the other side of Terminal 4 where a ministerial limousine was also waiting.
The sleek Ford moved out of the airport and, almost immediately, Miss Patel’s WhatsApp social media profile sparked back into life – starved as it had been of any wi-fi service during the flight back to London.
A BBC helicopter hovered over her car as it headed down the A4 into central London. Those watching were divided on whether the situation was more reminiscent of murder suspect O J Simpson’s famous white Bronco chase by Los Angeles police or a scarcely believable scene from fictional BBC2 political comedy The Thick Of It. Either way, it was a very modern farce being played out on 24-hour TV news, Twitter, websites and any other social media platform of your choosing.
Miss Patel had been ordered home on Wednesday night after Downing Street discovered she had been ‘less than frank’ with the Prime Minister during a face-toface meeting in No 10 on Monday, where she was supposed to provide full disclosure about her clandestine talks with senior Israelis.
Miss Patel apologised to the PM and promised not to repeat her behaviour. She also promised she had revealed everything. On that basis, No 10 had, through gritted teeth, gone out to publicly defend her – despite her flagrant breaches of both the ministerial code, which governs the conduct of ministers, and basic diplomatic protocol. So there was cold fury in No 10 on Wednesday evening when officials discovered that Miss Patel had failed to mention a further secret meeting with Israel’s public security minister Gilad Erdan in London on September 7. The first thought was to sack Miss Patel on the spot, even though she was more than 4,000 miles away in Kenya. But when Theresa May’s chief-of-staff Gavin Barwell telephoned her, she blustered: ‘I can explain, I can explain.’ So a decision was taken to order her home to face the music.
But any slender hopes of survival were fatally undermined yesterday when she was reported to have made another unauthorised trip to a hospital in the Golan Heights – an illegal Israeli settlement which the UK has not recognised since it was annexed from Syria 50 years ago. Miss Patel arrived in Nairobi at 9.30pm for the start of what was supposed to be a three-country tour of Africa accompanied by International Trade Secretary Liam Fox. Instead, after a sleepless night in the grand surroundings of the British High Commissioner’s residence in the Kenyan capital, Miss Patel caught the first flight home. We know now that she spent at least part of her business class journey composing her resignation statement. On landing, Downing Street left her to sweat for three hours while the Prime Minister carried
‘I can explain, I can explain’
out her regular audience with the Queen. By 6.22pm a smiling Miss Patel was pictured arriving at Downing Street, entering through the rear entrance. She was swiftly followed into No 10 by a rather less cheerful Mrs May.
At a little after 7pm, as her marketing consultant husband Alex Sawyer was seen leaving the family home in SouthEast London, Miss Patel’s ministerial chauffeur whisked her away from Downing Street. From today, the courtesy car won’t be available to her.