Meet Antonia Romeo, Keir Starmer’s super-ambitious pick to reboot the British state

Politico Europe · Feb 19, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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News Politics POLITICO spoke to 30 current and former politicians, political advisers and civil servants who have crossed paths with Britain’s new Whitehall boss at all levels. Antonia Romeo has been a state employee since her mid-20s, yet observers say she works more like a private sector CEO. | Illustration by Natália Delgado February 19, 2026 9:06 pm CET 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. 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. | Pool photo by Aaron Chown/AFP via Getty Images “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. 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. | Pool photo by Phil Noble/WPA via Getty Images 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 Rome