…from Politico…
U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his partner Carrie Symonds are engaged and are expecting a baby, the couple announced Saturday.
The couple got engaged at the end of last year and the baby is due in early summer.
The prime minister has repeatedly come under scrutiny over his personal life. It will be Johnson’s third marriage, after he divorced his first wife and split acrimoniously with his second.
The relationship between Johnson and Symonds, an environmental campaigner and former Conservative party official, was the subject of attention in 2019 after police were called to Symonds’ home by a neighbor who reported hearing an argument between the two….
image…Carrie Symonds hired Sarah Vaughan-Brown | Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images
Top UK civil servant quits, accusing minister of ‘vicious’ behavior
By Mark LandlerNew York Times ,February 29, 2020, 4:29 p.m.
LONDON — An extraordinary public row broke out in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s new government Saturday, with a top civil servant quitting amid allegations that he was bullied and mistreated by one of Johnson’s closest political allies.
The official who quit, Philip Rutnam, was the permanent secretary of the Home Office. He said that Home Secretary Priti Patel had carried out a “vicious and orchestrated” campaign to discredit him and undermine his authority as the ranking career official in the ministry, which oversees law enforcement and immigration.
Rutnam, a 33-year veteran of the government, said he had clashed repeatedly with Patel over her management of the Home Office, one of the most powerful ministries in the British government, whose immigration responsibilities give it a major role in shaping Britain’s departure from the European Union.
“I have received allegations that her conduct has included shouting and swearing, belittling people, making unreasonable and repeated demands — behavior that created fear and that needed some bravery to call out,” Rutnam said, reading an emotional statement before television cameras.
Rutnam said he believed his treatment was part of a wider pattern of abusive behavior in the government, which has been in a state of near-constant personnel upheaval since Johnson’s Conservative Party won a commanding majority in Parliament in December’s general election.
Earlier in February, the government’s top finance minister, Sajid Javid, resigned rather than accept a demand from the prime minister to cut loose his senior aides. Johnson’s influential political adviser, Dominic Cummings, has moved ruthlessly to remove officials he views as obstacles to Johnson’s agenda.
Career civil servants like Rutnam play a powerful, behind-the-scenes role in running Britain’s government. Often schooled at Oxford or Cambridge and studiously nonpartisan, they serve Labour and Conservative governments alike. But Cummings has made no secret of his belief that Johnson needs more “weirdos and misfits” and fewer of the Oxbridge-educated.
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Most of this housecleaning is going on behind closed doors, the subject of water-cooler gossip or anonymously sourced articles in newspapers. But with Rutnam’s bitter resignation — in which he accused Patel of lying — the tensions have spilled into public view.
Analysts said they could not recall a career civil servant quitting in such a spectacle.
Opposition Labour Party officials said the resignation laid bare the government’s drive to stamp out any internal dissent. Jon Trickett, party spokesman on civil service questions, said on Twitter that it showed “the underlying right-wing authoritarian but incompetent nature of the Johnson government.”….
… continued at The Boston Globe