Is Antonia Romeo what the civil service needs?
Coffee House Shots
The Spectator
4.4 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 12 February 2026
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When a PM is in crisis, what do they do? Sack the head of the civil service. Having lost both his Chief of Staff and Director of Communications at the beginning of the week, Keir Starmer resolved to make it a hat-trick by dispensing with the services of his short-serving Cabinet Secretary. The favourite to replace him is Antonia Romeo – currently doing great work at the Home Office, but comes with a series of ‘caveats’ concerning historic allegations of bullying and irregularities over expenses when she was in New York. She has been cleared of these and passed the civil service vetting process (with caveats) – although Simon McDonald, the former Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, has popped up in the news to warn No. 10 about plans to replace Wormald with Antonia Romeo without a new appointment process.
All things considered, Romeo is ‘ballsy and brassy’ and currently part of the most successful Secretary of State/mandarin pairing in Westminster, alongside Shabana Mahmood. Could she be exactly what the civil service needs? Would she be the one to drive through some serious ‘change’?
James Heale speaks to Tom Shipman and Jill Rutter.
Produced by Oscar Edmondson.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots. I'm James Heel and I'm joined today by Tim Shipman, the spectator's political editor and Jill Rutter of the Institute for Government. |
| 0:12.1 | Now Tim, the other story that's been rumbling on is the news that Chris Wormald is about to leave his post, expected, as cabinet secretary and potentially be replaced by Antonio Romero. Tell us more under, |
| 0:21.2 | who is Antonio Romero? She is currently the Perman Sec at the home office. Prior to that was |
| 0:27.1 | the senior Mandarin at the Department of Justice. She is a sort of one of the high flyers, very |
| 0:33.5 | ambitious, open about it, and one of the sort of civil servants who's been knocking on the door |
| 0:38.2 | of this job for a little while. When Chris Wormald was appointed in December 2024, the panel, |
| 0:45.0 | I think they had seven or eight, nine applicants, but four of them were cleared as appointable, |
| 0:50.1 | and this is important. So the four were Chris Wormold, who was at that point running the |
| 0:54.5 | Department for Health and had done so during the pandemic. And Tamara Finkelstein were both |
| 0:59.3 | judged appointable with no issues. The panel picked Finkelstein and Stama picked Wormald, |
| 1:04.8 | who I think his critics would say is one of the more plodding, time-serving, blob-dwelling |
| 1:09.0 | men of the last 30 years. |
| 1:11.3 | And Stama seems to have drawn the same conclusion because he's now pushing him out of the door, |
| 1:15.3 | despite the fact that almost any of us who know anything about Whitehall could have told him that 15 months ago. |
| 1:20.6 | Finkelstein has since retired, and the other two were Ollie Robbins, who's now running the Foreign Office, |
| 1:25.7 | and Antonio Romeo, who got basically |
| 1:27.9 | promoted to the home office as a kind of SOP, having not got the big job. Both came with issues. |
| 1:33.7 | They were appointable with issues. Now, the issues in Robbins case were that he might attract |
| 1:38.3 | a lot of negative publicity because he'd been up to his neck in the whole Brexit stuff. |
| 1:42.0 | Robbins is very busy at the foreign office. He's having to slim it down. |
| 1:45.0 | And also, there are issues with Robbins around a sort of Mandelson issue. |
| 1:51.0 | Mandelson was appointed before Robbins got his current job. |
... |
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