Paul Ovenden claimed British-Egyptian Alaa Abd el-Fattah was ‘a cause célèbre beloved of Whitehall’s sturdy, clean-shirted diplomats and their scurrying auxiliaries’
January 2, 2026 11:59
Sir Keir Starmer’s former director of strategy has criticised elements within the civil service for over-prioritising attempts to secure the release of Alaa Abd el-Fattah from Egypt.
The government has faced significant criticism after the prime minister posted on X that securing el-Fattah’s release from prison in Egypt was “a top priority for my government since we came to office” on Boxing Day.
Since his release, el-Fattah’s social media posts – in which he appeared to endorse the murder of Zionists and stated that he disliked white people – have resulted in calls for his British citizenship, obtained in 2021 under the previous Conservative government, to be rescinded.
The government has thus far resisted those calls, but Starmer has called the tweets “abhorrent” and said that the government would be “taking steps to review the information failures in this case”.
However, in an article in the Times on Friday, the prime minister’s former director of strategy laid the blame for the failures on the civil service.
Paul Ovenden, who worked in Downing Street until he resigned in September after offensive private messages he’d made to a colleague about Labour MP Diane Abbott while a Labour press officer in 2017 came to light, claimed that el-Fattah’s case was “a cause célèbre beloved of Whitehall’s sturdy, clean-shirted diplomats and their scurrying auxiliaries”.
He added: “They mentioned him with such regularity that it became a running joke among my colleagues: a totem of the ceaseless sapping of time and energy by people obsessed with fringe issues.”
The former Number 10 official went on to say that the issue has “revealed the sheer weirdness of how Whitehall spends its time” and was part of a wider issue that he described as what he described as the shifting of power towards what he called the “Stakeholder State”.
“Politics and power” he said, were moving away from voters “and towards groups with the time, money and institutional access to make themselves too important to ignore”.
“In this state, the government rows with muffled oars in order to appease a complex coalition of campaign groups, regulators, litigators, trade bodies and well-networked organisations. If the language of priorities is the religion of socialism, then consultations and reviews are the sacred texts of the Stakeholder State,” he went on
Ovenden refrained from criticising all civil servants and took aim at the Conservatives’ failure in office to tackle the problems he outlined, which he said was” “encapsulated this week by those Conservatives who promised immigration restrictions but governed as open-borders activists now touring TV studios demanding someone deports the ‘scumbag’ they handed citizenship to and campaigned for”, referencing the fact that Tory ministers had raised el-Fattah’s case several times during their period in office.
The Board of Deputies and Jewish Leadership Council had criticised the government for welcoming el-Fattah to the UK given his social media history, as did the former United States special envoy for monitoring and combatting antisemitism, Deborah Lipstadt.
El-Fattah’s nomination for a European human rights prize, the Sakharov Prize for Freedom, was withdrawn in 2014 over remarks on social media in which the Telegraph said he “appeared to call for the deaths ‘of a critical number of Israelis’”.
Since the posts resurfaced, Abd El Fattah has offered a "fulsome apology", saying: “Looking at the tweets now – the ones that were not completely twisted out of their meaning – I do understand how shocking and hurtful they are, and for that I unequivocally apologise.
"They were mostly expressions of a young man’s anger and frustrations in a time of regional crises (the wars on Iraq, on Lebanon and Gaza), and the rise of police brutality against Egyptian youth.
"I particularly regret some that were written as part of online insult battles with the total disregard for how they read to other people. I should have known better.”
However, he has continued to like posts containing anti-Zionist rhetoric, including one which claimed the scandal was the result of a "violent Zionist planned attack” against him.
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