Starmer seeks new top mandarin in Downing Street shake-up

Sir Keir Starmer will begin the process of appointing a new cabinet secretary after Britain’s top civil servant stepped down “by mutual agreement”.

Sir Chris Wormald left the role on Thursday after just 14 months as Sir Keir sought to shake up his Downing Street operation in the wake of the Peter Mandelson scandal.

He is the third senior figure to quit the Government in the past week following Sir Keir’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, and communications director, Tim Allan.

With three senior civil servants now jointly doing the cabinet secretary job, two interim chiefs of staff and no communications chief, Conservative shadow minister Alex Burghart said: “Britain isn’t being governed.”

Sir Chris is widely expected to be replaced by Home Office permanent secretary Dame Antonia Romeo, viewed by Downing Street as a “disrupter”, despite warnings from her former boss at the Foreign Office.

Lord Simon McDonald said the Prime Minister should start the recruitment process “from scratch” to ensure there was proper “due diligence”.

Dame Antonia previously faced allegations of bullying related to her time as consul-general in New York, but she was later cleared by the Cabinet Office.

Government sources have dismissed Lord McDonald’s claims, saying there was “absolutely no basis for this criticism” and calling him “a senior male official whose time has passed”.

In the meantime, Dame Antonia is one of the three civil servants filling in as cabinet secretary, alongside Cabinet Office permanent secretary Cat Little and Treasury permanent secretary James Bowler.

After 35 years in the Civil Service, Sir Chris is now the shortest-serving cabinet secretary in history, lasting less than the 23 months Sir Mark Sedwill held the position for under Theresa May and Boris Johnson.

Sir Chris is said to have received a £260,000 payout as part of the agreement that saw him leave the role, with The Times reporting the payment had to be signed off by the Prime Minister as it did not meet Whitehall’s value-for-money rules.

A similar payment of almost £250,000 previously had to be approved by Mr Johnson when the now Lord Sedwill stood down as cabinet secretary in 2020.