LONDON — She is accused of flinging a folder at an aide, hitting the staffer in the head. She reportedly told another offending underling to “get out of my face” and castigated her staff as “useless,” adding an f-bomb for good measure.
The allegations of abusive behavior by Home Secretary Priti Patel — all of which she denies — have made her a lightning rod in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s new cabinet, a ready-made villain for critics who accuse this hard-line Brexit government of running roughshod over British customs and institutions.
But when a respected career civil servant resigned last week because of what he claimed was a “vicious and orchestrated” campaign against him by Ms. Patel, what began as a juicy boss-from-hell story turned into a metaphor for Mr. Johnson’s broader tensions with Britain’s much vaunted civil service.
The feud between a populist leader and an entrenched bureaucracy carries echoes of the Trump administration’s war on the so-called “deep state,” with Mr. Johnson’s scruffy, iconoclastic adviser Dominic Cummings playing the role of Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s one-time in-house provocateur.
In this case, the civil servant, Philip Rutnam, who served as the permanent secretary in the Home Office, said Ms. Patel’s behavior was part of a pattern of bullying civil servants that needed to be called out. His mutiny came as Mr. Cummings is moving aggressively to shake up the bureaucracy, seeking to inject new people — especially ones with the math and science skills he considers lacking in senior civil servants — and rooting out those he deems hostile to Brexit.
