After years of scandal and excess, can she REALLY hope to keep her job?

Baroness scotland’s reign as secretary General of Her Majesty’s Commonwealth began on april Fool’s Day 2016, a date that seems grimly appropriate. For the profligacy, cronyism, and downright nastiness with which she has since managed the affairs of this noble organisation can only be described as a bad joke.

I have been writing about this murky affair since 2016, when a diplomatic source passed me an explosive dossier of internal emails, memos and other documents detailing huge sums of public money she had spent (some might say wasted) hiring chums and political allies, and doing up her grace-andfavour home.

Baroness scotland reacted with an olympian display of denial and obfuscation. First, she hired expensive lawyers who attempted to block publication of leaked documents, claiming that reporting their contents would breach the Data Protection act.

Then she complained to the Press standards watchdog about my entirely accurate reporting (after a six-month investigation, it ruled squarely against her). elsewhere, she hounded a wholly innocent member of her staff out of his job after wrongly accusing him of acting as the Mail’s source (he was later awarded £300,000 in compensation).

even yesterday, after being strongly criticised by the Commonwealth’s own audit committee over one of the many financial scandals which the Mail and various other news organisations helped bring to light, she refused to utter a single word of apology.

Instead, ‘Baroness shameless’ referred all inquiries to the offices of a law firm, Carter ruck.

It’s a depressing state of affairs, for an organisation whose hallowed charter, signed by the Queen, supposedly revolves around upholding ‘democracy, human rights and the rule of law’.

Indeed, a cynic might argue that, under her stewardship, the Commonwealth spending practices have instead often resembled those of a banana republic.

ONE of the Labour peer’s first acts was to hire not one but two wellconnected spin doctors to act as her personal fixers.

They were Matthew Doyle, a former Downing street aide who had worked for scotland’s friend and mentor Tony Blair, and Joe Phelan, a former employee of Pr outfit Weber shandwick. at a time when the Commonwealth was under severe financial pressure, she decided to pay them each the extortionate sum of £16,000... per month.

neither job was put out to tender and it remains unclear what exactly they did to justify their big salaries, although we do know that Phelan’s duties included advising on what, in emails leaked to the Mail, he described as the ‘extremely expensive’ refurbishment of her grace-andfavour Mayfair home.

We obtained detailed spreadsheets which set out her wish-list for the edwardian mansion. They included £33,000 of luxury paint, £100a-roll wallpaper, a £5,000 vanity unit, £11,000 on a ladies’ ‘powder room’ and a £1,200 bill for ‘relocating a chandelier’. It later emerged that £307 had even been spent on a lavatory seat. In all, spending on renovations at the sixstorey mansion rose by £73,000 on scotland’s watch.

Baroness scotland’s next highly contentious act was to add Lord Patel of Bradford to the payroll of the organisation, which is funded by British taxpayers to the tune of £5.5million per year.

again, the job was not put out to tender.

Kamlesh Patel was a curious candidate to provide ‘strategic advice’ to the Commonwealth. a former ambulanceman, social worker, and academic, his professional experience had largely involved serving on public health quangos. Beyond the field of healthcare, he had little obvious experience of international affairs, or the complex world of diplomacy.

What we do know, however, is that Patel was a close personal chum of Baroness scotland. Both were Labour peers who had travelled the world together on various junkets.

SHE even introduced Patel to the Queen, inviting him to join a party that accompanied the monarch on a visit to the secretariat headquarters, Marlborough House (a highly irregular move since he was an external contractor, rather than an employee).

Importantly, the Commonwealth’s code of ethics states that ‘ purchasing decisions’ such as hiring consultants ‘will never be made on the basis of personal friendships’.

Yet as the damning leaked report states, the lucrative publicly- funded contract that Patel’s firm received from the Commonwealth was given on ‘ the personal recommendation’ of Baroness scotland, who then instructed a subordinate to sign a document waiving normal spending rules. It’s also unclear what exactly Lord Patel, who hired two employees to work on the project, actually did for all that loot, which totalled £252,000 (including VaT).

His company KYa Global (which is registered to a small office in Bradford, has Patel’s wife Yasmin as its only other director, and before being hired had debts of nearly £50,000) was officially contracted to produce a report. However, the auditors say that Baroness scotland’s office has failed to provide them with a copy ‘despite requests’.

The years since have have seen several other intriguing hires on her watch.

They include Barnie Choudhury, who was employed to handle Pr for scotland’s office. He turned out to be a chum of Lord Patel, with whom he shared a senior role at a charity called aWaaZ.

This summer, Commonwealth heads of state will meet in rwanda. Items on the agenda are expected to include whether Baroness scotland ought to get the customary second term in office.

There is believed to be severe disquiet about her stewardship at the highest levels of the British government. But unless a majority of delegates vote for her removal, this ongoing scandal will surely continue.