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In “Former Ethics Chief Asked Greensill Post, MPs Said” (Report, June 9), Jim Pickard reports on the work of the last House of Commons select committee to review Lex Greensill and his eponymous company. It devotes a lot of space to comments made about my late husband, Jeremy Heywood – comments that I think cannot go unanswered.
Francis Maude, Minister of the Cabinet Office at the time of Greensill’s appointment, was amazed, among other things, by Greensill’s role in the unit he himself created and reported to him.
Maude adds that he might have accepted “a three-month arrangement” so as not to “quarrel” with my late husband. As the responsible minister, if he accepted the appointment, he should take responsibility for it.
Sir John Manzoni, the former Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet Office, reportedly said Greensill was given the role by my late husband without “an open recruitment process” as if it were a requirement for every appointment temporary private sector. It was not.
Bill Crothers, “a former senior official who then joined Greensill Capital” while still a senior official and with the blessing of Manzoni, did so, we are told, because my late husband had “a clear influence. on my decision to join his (the) company and become a director ”. Not because it was his choice to do so.
Pickard did not report that Ian Watmore, who oversaw the Cabinet Office Effectiveness and Reform group and to whom Lex Greensill reported, told the committee he was only working on channel funding. supply because it was encouraged by my late husband.
In their report, the select committee will surely identify the “lessons to be learned” from the episode of Greensill.
And yet there seems to be a first conclusion we are meant to draw from these latest submissions: that MM. Maude, Manzoni, Crothers, and Watmore really had nothing to do with anything, at any time. On the contrary, it was all due to Jeremy Heywood, who is no longer with us to give his side of the story.
Your readers will form their own opinion on this subject. But I can say without hesitation that if Jeremy was here today, he wouldn’t blame anyone else, alive or not, for the actions he had taken, and he would trust others to live up to the same standards. .
Suzanne Heywood London SW1, United Kingdom
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