It seemsthat "Useless" is not the only Johnson minister to reject government policy on home ground:

Build, build, build — but not in Michael "Gormless" Gove’s back yard

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/b...yard-5z2mzb8wl



Cosy .....

Ah, but these are also government ministers .....

Letter from Government Minister to his/her Constituency:-

"Hi, you lot, sadly, I am unable to continue representing your constituency, I am now a Government Minister!"

p.s. Please vote for me, to represent you, at any forthcoming election....."

You Tories make me laugh .....

Priti Patel faced fury today after she refused to face MPs over a computer debacle that saw hundreds of thousands of vital records wiped from a police database.

The Home Secretary sent her deputy, the Policing Minister Kit Malthouse, to the Commons after a significant number of fingerprint, DNA and arrest history records were lost due to human error and defective code.

Initially, some 150,000 records were believed to have been affected, but it has emerged the number is far higher than first thought at about 400,000.

Ms Patel earlier posed for pictures with police officers in Westminster and said everyone was working flat out to solve what she said was a 'technical coding error'.

But it was left to Mr Malthouse to face political fury from opposition parties this afternoon. He revealed the Home Secretary has commissioned an internal review.

Shadow Home Secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds said: 'I must ask, where is the Home Secretary? The loss of hundreds of thousands of pieces of data, data so important for apprehending suspects and safeguarding vulnerable people, is extraordinarily serious.

'It was the Home Secretary who needed to show leadership and take control. It's what previous home secretaries have done in a crisis - on the passport office, on Windrush, on knife crime, whatever their mistakes, home secretaries came and answered to this House, they didn't just offer a media clip as has happened today.

'This Home Secretary failing on violent crime, failing on the Windrush compensation scheme, with chaos on border testing, found to have broken the ministerial code, now won't even answer to parliament and the public on this most serious of issues.

'Where is the Home Secretary?'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...e-records.html



Indeed, Priti "Useless" Patel has a habit of ducking, diving and disappearing .....

You should really be asking where is the civil service in all of this. But anyway I wouldn't worry too much, the data will be restored from backups as if nothing had happened.

Indeed so.
In fact given the threats to their dominance that the Civil Service are facing I really wouldn't put it past them to have arranged this act deliberately.
After all, we can be pretty certain (forgive the pun) that Priti Patel herself was not the one pressing any buttons.

The home secretary has been recorded telling a Zoom call with the Conservative Friends of India group on Tuesday night: "On 'should we have closed our borders earlier', the answer is yes, I was an advocate of closing them last March."

Between mid March and June, the UK did not impose a ban or quarantine restrictions on international travellers arriving in the UK.

Priti Patel says UK should have closed borders in March 2020

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-55733357



As a holder of one of the four great offices of state, "Useless" Patel was surely entitled to express an opinion at the time but she didn't - in fact, as we know, she disappeared for long periods of time, apparently not interested in, or not allowed to take part in, the government's visible measures against coronavirus program ....