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Secret meetings with Israel: UK’s Indian-origin minister Priti Patel quits

Agencies
November 9, 2017

London, Nov 9: Britain's senior-most Indian-origin minister Priti Patel resigned from her Cabinet post over her unauthorised secret meetings with Israeli politicians, after a meeting at Downing Street with Prime Minister Theresa May.

Patel's position as international development minister had become increasingly untenable after it emerged that she had two further meetings with Israeli officials that were not disclosed through the proper procedure.

In her resignation, Patel again apologised and said her actions "fell below the standards of transparency and openness that I have promoted and advocated".

It follows a week of controversies around a dozen undisclosed meetings she had with other Israelis, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for which she had been forced to apologise.

Her departure from the Cabinet marks an abrupt halt to the meteoric rise of the Gujarati-origin MP, often touted as a potential future leader of the Conservative party and a prime ministerial candidate.

The 45-year-old was elected as a Conservative MP for Witham in Essex in 2010 and gained prominence in the then David Cameron-led Tory government as his 'Indian Diaspora Champion'.

She went on to be appointed to junior ministerial posts, treasury minister in 2014 and then employment minister after the 2015 general election, before May promoted her to secretary of state in the department for international development (DfID) last year.

A longstanding Eurosceptic, Patel is among the most vocal supporters of Brexit and had steered the 'Vote Leave' campaign in the lead up to the June 2016 referendum in favour of Britain's exit from the European Union (EU).

She must have hoped that the storm around her undisclosed meetings in Israel would die down after a formal apology before she flew out to Africa for an official tour of Uganda and Ethiopia yesterday.

But she was unable to attend any of the scheduled meetings as she was ordered to abandon the visit and fly back to London today "at the request of the prime minister".

Earlier this week, Downing Street had said that May had accepted Patel's apology over a series of meetings while she was on holiday in Israel in August without reporting them to the Foreign Office.

But new revelations of further meetings with Israeli officials following that visit had made Patel's position within the Cabinet very precarious.

It is understood that she met Israel's public security minister Gilad Erdan in the UK Parliament complex in early September and an Israeli foreign ministry official Yuval Rotem in New York later that month.

The British premier was reportedly told about the unreported New York meeting during Patel's apology conversation at Downing Street on Monday but only learned about her unreported meeting with Erdan after the talks.

Ministers are required to tell the UK Foreign Office when they are conducting official business overseas, but it emerged that British diplomats in Israel were not informed about any of Patel's meetings - which included a meeting with Netanyahu and other political figures as well as charity organisations.

Opposition parties had been calling for Patel's resignation as minister in charge of DfID and the country's aid budget if it emerged that she had breached the ministerial code of conduct and failed to follow established protocol.

In a letter to May, Labour's shadow Cabinet Office minister Jon Trickett had called on the premier to either call in her independent adviser on ministerial standards to investigate, or "state publicly and explain your full reasons for why Priti Patel retains your confidence".

In her apology statement on Monday, Patel had attributed the unreported meetings to "enthusiasm".

"In hindsight, I can see how my enthusiasm to engage in this way could be misread, and how meetings were set up and reported in a way which did not accord with the usual procedures. I am sorry for this and I apologise for it," she said.

Her conduct had already led May to direct her Cabinet Office to look into tightening the ministerial code of conduct to avoid any such incidents in future.

Downing Street was also forced to deny that Patel's meetings in Israel had led to any change of political stance on the region after it emerged that in the wake of her visit in August, Patel had discussed potentially providing some of Britain's aid money to Israel's armed forces which run field hospitals in the disputed Golan Heights area.

Britain does not officially recognise Israeli occupation of the area, seized from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War, and DfID was reportedly advised against any such move.

According to an Israeli media report, during her August visit to Israel, Patel also visited an Israeli military field hospital in the Golan Heights.

Manuel Hassassian, the Palestinian ambassador to the UK, said the offer to send aid money to the Israeli army made a mockery of the British government's claim to be "pushing for a two-state solution".

"It was shocking for me a Cabinet minister breaking the ministerial protocol and meeting 12 officials, high-ranking, including Netanyahu," he added.

Patel has been a longstanding supporter of Israel and also a former vice-chairman of the Conservative Friends of Israel group.

Meanwhile, it was also claimed that Patel deliberately avoided facing questions over the issue from MPs in the House of Commons today, by bringing forward her flight to Kenya.

It was left to her junior, DfID minister of state for the Middle East Alistair Burt, to defend his boss' actions in Parliament.

"The meetings were not particularly secret...If I had gone to Israel, I would have wanted a schedule like this," he told MPs.

It was widely believed that the delay in dismissing Patel was because the prime minister was more at ease keeping pro- Brexit MPs close at hand to prevent them doing too much damage as opponents of government decisions on the Tory backbenches.

But with her departure now, May has lost a second senior minister within a week, after Sir Michael Fallon stood down as defence minister amid allegations of inappropriate behaviour towards female journalists.

Another of her close Cabinet allies, first secretary of state Damian Green, is also under investigation over misconduct allegations and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has been under fire over his handling of a case involving a British Iranian jailed in Tehran.

The prime minister has been desperate not to shake up her already tenuous hold on Downing Street ever since her decision to call a snap general election in June backfired and lost the Conservative party its majority in Parliament.

But she has been increasingly seen as a weak leader trying to steady a very shaky regime.

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Agencies
May 27,2020

Global health experts on Wednesday said novel coronavirus is here to stay for more than a year and called for aggressive testing to prevent its spread.

In an interaction with Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, health experts Professor Ashish Jha and Professor Johan Giesecke talked about the COVID-19 pandemic as part of the series being aired on Congress social media channels.

While Jha exuded confidence that a vaccine will be available in a year's time, Prof Giesecke said India should practice a lockdown that is as 'soft' as possible, as a severe lockdown will ruin its economy very quickly.

"When the economy is opened up after lockdown, you have to create confidence among people," Harvard health expert Ashish Jha told Gandhi.

Jha is a professor of Global Health at TH Chan School of Public Health and Director, Harvard Global Health institute.

He said coronavirus is a '12-18 months' problem and the world is not going to be free of this till 2021.

The expert also called for the need for aggressive testing strategy for high-risk areas.

Gandhi, while interacting with the experts, said life is going to change post COVID-19.

"If 9/11 was a new chapter, this will be a new book," he remarked.

Professor Johan Giesecke, former chief scientist, European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said India should have a 'soft lockdown'.

"The situation that India is in, I think, you should have a soft lockdown, as soft as possible," he said.

"I think for India, you will ruin your economy very quickly if you have a severe lockdown. It is better, skip the lockdown, take care of the old and the frail...," he noted.

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Agencies
August 2,2020

New Delhi, Aug 2: BCCI president Sourav Ganguly on Sunday said the Women's IPL or the Challenger series, as it is better known, is "very much on", ending speculation about the parent body not having a plan for Harmanpreet Kaur and her team.

The men's IPL will be held between September 19 and November 8 or 10 (final date yet to be locked in) in the UAE due to the surge in Covid-19 cases in India. The women's IPL will also be fit in to the schedule, according to the BCCI chief.

"I can confirm to you that the women's IPL is very much on and we do have a plan in place for the national team also," Ganguly told PTI ahead of the IPL Governing Council meeting later on Sunday.

The BCCI president, who is awaiting a Supreme Court verdict on waiver of the cooling-off period to continue in the position, did not divulge details but another senior official privy to the development said that women's Challenger will be held during the last phase of IPL like last year.

"The women's Challenger series is likely to be held between November 1-10 and there could be a camp before that," the source said.

The former India captain also said that the centrally contracted women players will have a camp which has been delayed due to the prevailing situation in the country.

"We couldn't have exposed any of our cricketers -- be it male or female to health risk. It would have been dangerous," Ganguly said.

"The NCA also remained shut because of Covid-19. But we have a plan in place and we will have a camp for women, I can tell you that," he added.

The BCCI's cricket operations team is chalking up a schedule where Indian women are likely to have two full-fledged white-ball series against South Africa and the West Indies before playing the ODI World Cup in New Zealand. 

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Agencies
July 15,2020

Huawei will be completely removed from the UK's 5G networks by the end of 2027, the UK government announced on Tuesday after a review by the country's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) on the impact of US sanctions against the Chinese telecommunications giant.

In the lead up to this complete removal of all Huawei kit from UK networks, there will be a total ban on the purchase of any new 5G kit after December 31, 2020.

The decision was taken at a meeting of the UK's National Security Council (NSC) chaired by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in response to new US sanctions against the telecom major imposed in May which removed the firm's access to products which have been built based on US semiconductor technology.

5G will be transformative for our country, but only if we have confidence in the security and resilience of the infrastructure it is built upon, said Oliver Dowden, UK Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).

Following US sanctions against Huawei and updated technical advice from our cyber experts, the government has decided it necessary to ban Huawei from our 5G networks. No new kit is to be added from January 2021, and UK 5G networks will be Huawei free by the end of 2027. This decisive move provides the industry with the clarity and certainty it needs to get on with delivering 5G across the UK, he said.

The minister, who laid out the details of the UK's ban on Huawei in the House of Commons, said the government will now seek to legislate with a new Telecoms Security Bill to put in place the powers necessary to implement the tough new telecoms security framework.

By the time of the next election (2024) we will have implemented in law an irreversible path for the complete removal of Huawei equipment from our 5G networks, said Dowden.

The new law will give the government the national security powers to impose these new controls on high risk vendors and create extensive security duties on network operators to drive up standards, DCMS said.

Technical experts at the NCSC reviewed the consequences of the US sanctions and concluded that Huawei will need to do a major reconfiguration of its supply chain as it will no longer have access to the technology on which it currently relies and there are no alternatives which we have sufficient confidence in.

They found the new restrictions make it impossible to continue to guarantee the security of Huawei equipment in the future.

After a ban on the purchase of new Huawei kit for 5G from next year, the aim is to completely remove the Chinese vendor's influence on 5G networks across the UK by the end of 2027.

The DCMS said Tuesday's decision takes into account the UK's specific national circumstances and how the risks from these sanctions are manifested in the country.

The existing restrictions on Huawei in sensitive and critical parts of the network remain in place, it highlighted.

The DCMS said the US action also affects Huawei products used in the UK's full fibre broadband networks. However, the UK has managed Huawei's presence in the UK's fixed access networks since 2005 and we also need to avoid a situation where broadband operators are reliant on a single supplier for their equipment.

As a result, following security advice from experts, DCMS is advising full fibre operators to transition away from purchasing new Huawei equipment. A technical consultation will determine the transition timetable, but it is expect this period to last no longer than two years.

The government said its new approach strikes the right balance by recognising full fibre's established presence and supporting the connections that the public relies on, while fully addressing the security concerns.

It stressed that its new policy in relation to high risk vendors has not been designed around one company, one country or one threat but as an enduring and flexible policy that will enable the UK to manage the risks to the network, now and in the future.

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