A successful woman associated with inclusion initiatives makes for an even more convenient villain.
“Keir Starmer isn’t serious if he thinks the ‘queen of woke’ can run Britain’s civil service,” barked a headline in GB News this week.
Intrigued to know who the supposed ‘queen of woke’ is, I clicked on the article. The answer, according to the channel’s US correspondent Steven Edginton, is Dame Antonia Romeo.
Romeo may not be a household name outside Whitehall, but she has been at the centre of media chatter following the departure of Chris Wormald as cabinet secretary and head of the civil service. This week, she was appointed the UK’s next top civil servant, and, notably, the first woman to hold the role.
Romeo’s record is hardly that of a radical firebrand. She was permanent secretary at the home office and was shortlisted for cabinet secretary last year. She has previously held senior roles at the Ministry of Justice and the former Department for International Development and served as consul general in New York. At the Ministry of Justice, she earned respect for insisting that ministers treat staff professionally, reportedly warning Dominic Raab about standards of conduct amid concerns over bullying allegations.
She has also built a reputation as a senior champion of equality within the civil service, serving as a gender inclusion lead. Rather than being framed as evidence of managerial competence and institutional leadership, GB News treats it as proof of ‘woke’ capture.
Hence the ‘queen of woke’ label, a nickname attributed in the article to an unnamed ‘senior mandarin.’ Once upon a time, serious accusations required named sources and substantiated claims. Here, an anonymous jibe is elevated to a headline.
So, what is the substance behind the outrage? During her tenure at the Department for International Trade, Romeo acknowledged the flying of the trans flag, encouraged staff to watch Seahorse, a film about a trans man’s journey to parenthood, and amplified a message from a non-binary diplomat encouraging colleagues to include preferred pronouns in email signatures and adopt gender-neutral language. Following the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, she wrote to staff recommitting the department to diversity and inclusion.
To critics at GB News, this amounts to evidence of ‘wokeness’ – pronouns in email signatures, symbolic gestures of solidarity, workshops such as Tai Chi or Japanese calligraphy offered to staff. These are presented as though they are incompatible with trade negotiations or administrative competence.
The article also revives allegations of bullying during Romeo’s time in New York and at the Department for International Trade. Significantly, this aspect of the story has been picked up by media outlets some way from the usual right-wing sources. Both the BBC and Channel 4 News have reported on the bullying claims, with the latter running the story over more than one night. Individual civil servants have said they experienced bullying at Dame Antonia’s hands. It has been suggested that the Foreign Office’s own investigations did not reach a definitive conclusion and it is the Cabinet Office’s investigations which didn’t uphold the claims, and held that staff survey data reportedly showed self-reported bullying falling during her leadership, broadly in line with civil service averages.
Clearly this is story which will run for a while yet before we know whether Romeo’s managerial style is problematic or whether individuals felt uncomfortable with her challenging civil service traditions.
Yet undoubtedly missing from the GB News’ story, is the fuller picture: her experience running major departments, her willingness to challenge ministers on staff conduct, and the practical realities of overseeing thousands of officials.
The civil service has long been a convenient culture war target, portrayed as a bastion of metropolitan liberalism rather than what it is – a complex administrative machine tasked with delivering the government’s agenda.
It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that for anti-woke campaigners, any prospective cabinet secretary would attract scrutiny. A successful woman associated with inclusion initiatives makes for an even more convenient villain.
As cabinet secretary, Romeo should be judged on her effectiveness, impartiality and integrity. That’s a serious test. A headline built on a derogatory nickname from an anonymous source isn’t.
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