LONDON — “Her office was like something out of Black Mirror,” recalls a young official of her first trip to see the woman now leading Britain’s civil service.
Wherever she looked in Antonia Romeo’s old sanctum at the Department for International Trade, Romeo’s face smiled back. “It was covered in pictures of her with famous people,” the footballer David Beckham among them, the official recalled. “I couldn’t concentrate on the meeting, because I was just looking at the wall thinking, ‘is that Imelda Staunton?’”
If this kind of self-promotion sits awkwardly with Britain’s highly-strung reputation, it clashes violently with the stuffy etiquette of its civil service — where leaders are so notorious for self-restraint and false modesty that they were satirized in a TV drama called “Yes Minister.”
Yet Romeo — who Prime Minister Keir Starmer named as the first ever female Cabinet secretary and head of Britain’s civil service on Thursday — is no ordinary civil servant. And that is exactly why Starmer wants her in the job.
Now 51, she has been a state employee since her mid-20s, yet observers say she works more like a private sector CEO. A famed operator and prolific networker who has never hidden her ambition, she is seen as the opposite of Chris Wormald, who Starmer forced out with a bumper payoff last week after Labour aides complained he was a plodding functionary (a characterization rejected by his allies.)
Her proposed appointment was met with a vicious briefing war in Whitehall. Bullying allegations resurfaced from her time as a diplomat in New York nine years ago (an investigation at the time found “no case to answer”), just as Starmer is accused of poor due diligence for other appointments. Former colleagues complain consistently about her self-regard, including claims that she asked staff to put framed Vogue and New Yorker articles about her in the Manhattan residence’s bathroom, and her all-guns-blazing approach to jolting the system into action.
POLITICO spoke to 30 current and former politicians, political advisers and civil servants who have crossed paths with Romeo at all levels, most of whom requested anonymity to speak frankly. Several voiced discontent, while others vociferously defended her and dismissed the gripes about her (often from women) as misogyny.
But even her staunchest critics acknowledge that Romeo has energy like almost no other civil servant and has a way of pushing Whitehall out of its comfort zone. Nearly a year after Starmer promised to “rewire” the state, his aides are now banking on her being the person to get it done.
Not your usual civil servant
In some ways, Romeo’s rise to the top looks conventional. Born in London, she studied at the fee-paying Westminster School followed by philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University. She was in the same year as Liz Truss, who went on to be Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister, and the veteran Conservative strategist Sheridan Westlake.
Unlike most classmates, Romeo travelled in to school by Tube and would do homework in the lab where her mother, a biochemistry professor, worked full-time. Her parents kept her aware of the gender divide; while Romeo was a Brownie (Britain’s junior Girl Scouts), her father refused to let her gain the “house orderly” badge that involved sweeping and making tea.
A fan of SoulCycle, skiing, game theory and (like Starmer) Arsenal football club, she had a brief stint in the management consultancy firm Oliver Wyman, where her husband John still works. She then joined the civil service in 2000 after seeing an advert in The Economist — her go-to publication — for an economist in the Lord Chancellor’s department.
One of her early roles was as the private secretary for Labour peer Charles Falconer, who served as justice secretary in the mid-2000s. “It was a period of very difficult and massive constitutional and organizational reform,” he said. “She drove the reforms fearlessly, taking on every bit of the system to deliver … she took on No. 10 and the establishment of the civil service.
“If it’s change you want, she is the person to have by your side. She’ll take the flak remorselessly. She gives you the right advice and she will 100 percent deliver. It is a total mystery that she wasn’t appointed 14 months ago.”
There followed a steady rise through the ranks of government. She was mentored by the former Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood, who she called an “inspiration” after his death in 2018, and landed the job of Britain’s consul general to New York in 2016 after she moved to the city with her family.
Here, as a diplomat charged with promoting Britain overseas, Romeo began work on the sort of personal brand that would make most traditional civil servants shudder. She mingled with high society at parties hosted at the consul general’s residence in midtown Manhattan, where those invited or celebrated included Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour, fashion designer Stella McCartney and actor Joanna Lumley.
One party hosted Rupert Murdoch and Theresa May in the room at the same time. One attendee recalled there being jokes about whether the media mogul was there to see Romeo or the prime minister.
Another former official angrily recalled being unable to ascend the grand staircase of the Foreign Office in London one day because Romeo was posing for a photoshoot, including with Palmerston, the department’s cat.
In 2017 Romeo won her first of three positions as a permanent secretary — leading a whole government department — at the Department for International Trade during the Brexit negotiations, briefly “commuting” (as some former colleagues put it) between London and New York. She later volunteered to pay back some travel expenses.
Soon afterwards she was approached to guest edit the BBC’s flagship morning radio program, Today — an honor usually reserved for academics, business leaders and sports and music stars, including U2’s singer Bono and Yoko Ono.
Romeo was personally keen to take part, said a person with knowledge of the request — but the government machine appears to have stepped in. Another person said: “There was a degree of consternation at the top of [Downing Street] that a civil servant would be putting themselves so directly in the limelight.” A third said: “No. 10 refused various requests for profiles or interview requests on her.”
(A government official contested this version of events, saying Romeo declined the request after it went through due process, rather than it being blocked by No. 10.)
Romeo’s star continued to rise back in Whitehall, even if her public profile was dimmed. In Truss, her old uni contemporary who was the trade secretary, she had a match for directness and energy. One official recalled colleagues joking about Truss’s welcome photo with Romeo, where the new minister stood one step higher than her top civil servant.
Romeo moved in 2021 to the top job at the Ministry of Justice, a department battling endless crises where a former colleague recalled her being effective — while (again) having an office with photos of herself with famous people. “She was quite overbearing on the comms teams for her personal comms,” the person added. “It’s not necessarily a criticism.” Another former official claimed she was “detested” by officials in the Treasury, with whom she had to negotiate difficult budgetary issues.
Last year Romeo moved to head up the Home Office, perhaps the only department with more crises than justice, where she was appointed by Home Secretary Yvette Cooper. Her closest Labour ally, though, has been Shabana Mahmood — with whom Romeo shared a frank approach in the justice department and who replaced Cooper at the Home Office in September. It was not just the politicians who followed; the Home Office’s new chief operating officer, Jerome Glass, moved from the justice department last June.
But Romeo has still not been free of criticism from some colleagues.
One government official complained to POLITICO that Romeo’s office reported an X account that was posting baseless conspiracy theories about her to the Home Office monitoring unit — which is more commonly used to track hostile social media sentiment that could lead to protests or extremism.
Bullying claims
The trickiest choice for Starmer — who appointed two men, former U.S. Ambassador Peter Mandelson and his former Director of Communications Matthew Doyle, despite knowing of their friendships with pedophiles — was how to navigate bullying claims against Romeo during her time in New York, which resurfaced in media reports this week.
The Cabinet Office has repeatedly insisted there was only one formal complaint against Romeo during that period, and an investigation concluded there was “no case to answer.”
However, three people with knowledge of the process told POLITICO that more than 10 civil servants raised concerns about Romeo’s behaviour or conduct during her time in New York, some of which were drawn upon in the single formal complaint.
Two of the people said that some staff did not enter standalone formal complaints because they could not be guaranteed that their identities would be kept from senior staff, including Romeo, as part of a process designed to prevent spurious accusations.
Romeo was investigated by Tim Hitchens, the former ambassador to Japan, as part of a wider process ultimately decided on by the Cabinet Office in London. “It was essentially brushed under the carpet by the Cabinet Office, saying, ‘this is our business, not yours. Get lost,’” one of the three people said. (A government official disputed this, saying that as Romeo was on secondment, only the Cabinet Office could preside over an investigation.)
A Cabinet Office spokesperson told POLITICO: “As we have repeatedly said, these claims were raised nine years ago and were thoroughly investigated. The allegations were dismissed on the basis that there was no case to answer.
“Ahead of Dame Antonia’s appointment as Cabinet Secretary, a comprehensive due diligence process took place.”
Government officials also point out that Romeo has held three permanent secretary roles in nine years without complaints, and that she was previously approved for the Cabinet secretary shortlist in 2024.
Supporters point to sexism
And Romeo’s supporters see a successful civil servant whose critics’ petty gripes amount to sexism.
She is a member of the Athenæum, a private member’s club on London’s Pall Mall which only began admitting female members in 2002. Plenty in Whitehall have long considered its own club of top officials to be pale, male and stale. Some male ministers have had plenty of photos of themselves in their offices, without being remarked on publicly.
Dave Penman, the general secretary of the FDA union for senior civil servants, said that while Romeo courts publicity, she is also ambitious, dynamic and inspirational. “There are a lot of traits in women leaders that are deemed as negative, that in men are considered good,” he said. “She gets a lot of shit that a lot of other civil servants don’t get.”
Penman pointed to a 2023 report about former Justice Secretary Dominic Raab, who resigned following a bullying inquiry. It found that Romeo — as his department’s top civil servant — told Raab directly that there had been complaints about his behavior. (Raab said at the time that the inquiry “set a dangerous precedent” by “setting the threshold for bullying so low.”)
Penman added: “She does not get the credit she deserves as the only permanent secretary who stood up to Raab.”
Others in government during this time had a more nuanced recollection. One former official recalled that Romeo told civil servants not to refuse Raab’s requests. Another said: “I got the impression that she was trying to prove to the department that she was saying the stuff to Dom that they wanted her to say, but I don’t think she was a full agent of the department in that sense. She was trying to balance differing perspectives.”
Keeping warring groups at bay like this is an essential part of the job of a permanent secretary, but it has also allowed conflicting myths about Romeo to run unchallenged.
While some on the right have dubbed her the “queen of woke” for supporting diversity initiatives, one former colleague recalled that when the Ministry of Justice pulled out of a scheme run by the LGBTQ+ rights charity Stonewall, “Antonia to her credit didn’t complain, didn’t grumble. She just made it happen, and dealt with quite a bit of internal flak for it.”
One official who worked with Romeo at the trade department described her as a “very political civil servant,” in a good way. When U.S. President Donald Trump imposed a series of tariffs including on whisky and shortbread, “she got that that was a problem and the first port of call was to get all the whisky and shortbread people in for a round table,” they said. “She just moved very quickly and ran with it where other permanent secretaries might have been too high and mighty to do the work.”
Conservative Brandon Lewis, who served as justice secretary before Raab, said Romeo’s “focus and motivation” helped end a barristers’ strike and praised her as a “real leader.”
‘Does Keir Starmer need a paper pusher? No he fucking doesn’t’
Romeo’s supporters — and some of her critics — say her personality is exactly the reason Starmer needs her in the job.
While political officials have a mixed opinion on Romeo, many are vicious about her predecessors for the opposite reasons.
Before he was sacked, one former Labour official complained Wormald was “truly abysmal” at driving change. When Simon McDonald, the former head of the diplomatic service, gave an interview to Channel 4 News warning Starmer off appointing Romeo, one former Tory official fumed: “Fuck me … How fucking cheap.”
One Whitehall figure said of Romeo: “She’s got an ego. She loves publicity. That doesn’t make her bad at her job — and that’s the key element.
“There’s are lots of fucking boring personality types that couldn’t inspire and lead anyone. People are prosecuting her personality rather than how she does in the job.”
Six former Cabinet secretaries — including Gus O’Donnell, whose nickname on Whitehall is “God” — issued a joint statement on Thursday night praising Romeo as an “excellent choice” for the role. “Dame Antonia’s track record shows she is very well placed to deliver the necessary changes,” they said.
“As ever, the extremes are bullshit,” added a former government official. “I think she’s a serious person and very intelligent. She’s not going to save the world single handedly — nobody should — but the negative is very overdone.”
Another former government official said: “She’s incredibly effective, thrusting, dynamic. Do I think she’s bent various rules in the past? Yes. Is she very egotistical and has a deep regard for her self-image? Yes. But bending rules and pushing things to the maximum is part of what makes her good. She’s not pale, male and stale like permanent secretaries we’re used to.”
Other current and former officials are less effusive, pointing to other dynamic female permanent secretaries such as Sarah Healey, who leads the housing department without the same notoriety, and to government policies that have gone wrong during Romeo’s tenure.
While one former official praised her for knowing “a shit civil servant from a good one,” a current official said: “She has a reputation for firing people, which is great for Keir wanting to revamp the civil service, but you also have to lead. You have to come up with ideas.”
Other officials warn that her greatest challenge may be convincing civil servants to back her approach — a task at which many of her predecessors have failed.
One former senior government official perhaps summed it up best with the words: “I’ve never liked her, but I have to admire her.”
They added: “For all the women saying she’s no sister, actually I’ve kind of got an admiration for her … Does Keir Starmer need a paper pusher right now? No he fucking doesn’t.”
One phrase was the most telling from Starmer as he welcomed Romeo to the job. The prime minister called her “the right person to drive the government to reform.”
Downing Street officials are looking more broadly at how the role of Cabinet secretary works within the system, including studying work on reform by the Institute for Government, two people with knowledge of the conversations told POLITICO.
A third person said Darren Jones, chief secretary to the prime minister, has been inviting senior civil servants who can provide examples of where they’ve jumpstarted the system to give presentations to a committee of Cabinet ministers.
“She’s going to be in quite a strong position,” one supporter of Romeo said, “not quite unsackable, but in a position to dictate and have ideas.” She may soon find that a necessity.
Meet Antonia Romeo, Keir Starmer’s super-ambitious pick to reboot the British state
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