Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has unveiled her new shadow cabinet including Dame Priti Patel, who was home secretary under Boris Johnson.
Other key appointments include Robert Jenrick, who Badenoch defeated for the leadership of the Conservative Party, will serve as her shadow justice secretary and Chris Philp, the former policing minister, is the new shadow home secretary.
Badenoch told the press that her new top team “draws on the talents of people from across the Conservative Party, based on meritocracy and with a breadth of experience and perspective, just as I promised during the campaign.”
She added, “Our party’s problems will only be solved with a team effort, and I am confident my shadow cabinet ministers will deliver effective opposition as we seek to win back the trust of the public” and promised they would “get to work holding Labour to account”.
However, two of her former rivals for the leadership of the party were not appointed to the shadow cabinet.
Former security minister Tom Tugendhat, who is a practising Catholic but has Jewish heritage, was not given a shadow cabinet role.
James Cleverly, the former home secretary who, to the surprise of many, was eliminated from the Tory leadership race by Conservative MPs in the penultimate round, told the Financial Times that he would not serve on the frontbench.
Other former cabinet ministers including Hertsmere MP Oliver Dowden, foreign minister Andrew Mitchell and former Brexit secretary Steve Barclay all indicated that they would serve their party from the backbenches.
The Liberal Democrats have criticised some of the appointments to the shadow cabinet. “How can they claim to be able to hold this new government to account when they have just as many disagreements with each other?”, Liberal Democrat cabinet office spokesperson Sarah Olney MP said in a statement.
She added: “From a shadow justice secretary who wants to leave the ECHR [European Court of Human Rights] to a shadow foreign secretary who had to resign for holding undisclosed meetings, this shadow cabinet has more than a ‘whiff of impropriety’.”
In 2017, Patel resigned as international development secretary in Theresa May’s government after having been dramatically summoned back from an official visit to Ethiopia and Uganda.
She was accused of holding unauthorised meetings with Israeli officials, including with then-opposition leader Yair Lapid and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In August 2017 she travelled to Israel on a family holiday, which she paid for herself, and 12 meetings were organised for her by Conservative Friends of Israel honorary president Lord Polak.
She was also said to have visited an IDF field hospital near Israel’s border with Syria in the Golan Heights and it was reported at the time that the government was considering using British taxpayers’ money to treat Syrian refugees fleeing the conflict in their homeland in Israel. The reported plans did not materialise.
In her resignation letter, Patel said that her actions “fell below the standards of transparency and openness that I have promoted and advocated”.
However, the JC reported at the time that although Patel’s meeting with Netanyahu was not authorised in advance, the British government was made aware of it within hours.
Then-Middle East minister Alistair Burt and Tony Kay, then deputy British ambassador in Israel, met Michael Oren, who was the time was Deputy Minister at the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office on the same day as Patel met Netanyahu (August 22, 2017).
According to the notes of the meeting, Oren referred to Patel having had a successful meeting with Netanyahu, which was conveyed to No10.
The JC also reported that No10 instructed Patel not to include her meeting with Israeli foreign ministry official Yuval Rotem in New York on September 18 in her list of previously undisclosed meetings for fear of embarrassing the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
