Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Baroness to be ousted as leader after briefing war
The Foreign Office have for six years been briefing against her
SOURCE CLOSE TO THE BARONESS
COMMONWEALTH leaders are poised to oust the organisation’s Secretarygeneral Baroness Scotland in an extraordinary spat.
Britain has backed a bid to install Jamaican Kamina Johnson Smith in the Labour peer’s place after a straw poll in Rwanda.
Sources on each side accuse the other of a bitter briefing war over the Dominica-born former Attorney General.
The campaign to de-select her has been divisive, with misinformation about her record.
Sources say she has
racked up more than £600,000 in employment tribunal costs. It has also emerged a report on finances was being withheld from the Secretariat board.
But a source close to the peer claimed the tribunal costs were years old and the report had inaccuracies.
They added: “The Foreign Office have for six years been briefing against her.”
Boris Johnson asked nations in 2020 about her leadership and there was no consensus for her to stay, sources claim.
But another source said he “refused to reveal the number of states he’d received objections from”.