sometimes with some of the staff in the department. and the other bit was that since it was brought to her attention, she had taken note of it. so, i set out some mitigating factors but i did think actually, the evidence was there that she had bullied some staff. there are lots of tory mps who say to us that they are worried the prime minister is tarnishing notjust his own reputation but that of the government and the conservative party and also institutions, the actual office of prime minister. are you worried that this pattern of behaviour and we pointed out that you resigned and lord geidt has resigned that it is dragging down that office? there have been quite a lot of issues. i mean, there were, for example, there was the original attempt to overturn the ruling about the committee on standards rulings,
a bit easier to understand about the prime minister s behaviour. there s also a discrepancy i between what he lord geidt is saying in this letter about i what were the government s, to an extent, pre ordained intentions around all- of this and what those in number 10 are saying where they re saying no, we merely asked i for his guidance on something | that we are contemplating . and there s clearly a sense from some in number 10 l that they feel he was looking for a pretext to resign, - having 24 hours previously said to the prime minister he wants| to carry on until at least christmas. . well, and let s see what borisjohnson s letter to lord geidt then said, because there s a hint of that there. he wrote: that s the clue that it s to do about tariffs on imports of chinese steel. then the pm goes on: and then there s a later bit in the letter where he sort of hints that maybe lord geidt was finding the pressure of the job a little
this decision lightly. it s very sad that it has come to this. can you help decode his letter because it s written in a very kind of behind the scenes operator kind of way. what does he really mean? well, i don t know the details but i mean, it s clear that he was asked to advise on something which, as he said in his letter, would have involved deliberate breaches of the ministerial code and he felt that put him in what he described as an impossible and odious position. and it was something that he just could not live with. as somebody who has worked in this world, that word odious, that is a pretty nuclear word, isn t it? yes, absolutely, which shows the strength of his feeling and think this was the final straw coming on top of, for example, his concerns about the fact that the prime minister had not said anything about the ministerial code in all of his explanations of the partygate saga. of course, this is not the first time this has happened, lord geidt s
tensions not least. because in the essence of the exchanges that we ve seen between the outgoingl standards ethics adviser and the prime minister, j needless to say, he was rather the adviser i rather keen- on the importance of the ministerial code| and it s his view was that the prime minister was much less so, - and we saw that at the end - of may when, when we saw that lord geidt really didn t - like the idea that the prime minister hadn t outwardly, until that point, said - that the ministerial code mattered, in his view i borisjohnson s view he hadn t breached it when he was fined over. the whole partygate thing. and we ve seen it in these i letters of in these exchanges of letters following i lord geidt s resignation. yeah. and that s the thing that s happened today, because vicki, when we were doing the last episode of newscast which is available on bbc sounds, the news broke in the middle of us having a chat about something else and we both were just like, whoa! a
predecessor resigned, and that of course was you, so you have your own personal experience of working in this role. did you share lord geidt s frustration with what has been going on? in my case, it was slightly different in that there was a considerable investigation in the cabinet office and they did a lot of work and produced a very long report which i then advised on and advised the home secretary had breached the ministerial code and the prime minister said, no, she hasn t and ifelt well, if the prime minister will reject the advice of his adviser, there was nothing for me to do but resign. there s a bit of speculation that lord geidt may be was finding the role a bit difficult or the public scrutiny of the role a bit difficult and the prime minister, in his letter to him, sort of hints at that. what do you make of that? i don t know i thought he handled the constitutional affairs hearing pretty well.