Trouble at t’Diversity Mill…

Are things falling apart for the establishment’s man at the Equality Commission?

It was not supposed to work like this. The Government's equality watchdog – which is charged with rooting out discrimination on the grounds of sex, race, religion, sexuality, age or disability – was yesterday in the dock charged with discrimination by a member of its own staff.

Is anyone really surprised by this? That a quango doesn’t abide by the rules it expects the rest of us to follow?

The woman before an employment tribunal yesterday was Brid Johal, from Tipperary. (These things are important when it comes to equality). She was an aide to the aide of Mr Phillips. Even aides have aides in the wonderful world of quangos…

Why not? They aren’t spending their own money, after all…

While she was on maternity leave the person who was covering for her – whom we might, unkindly perhaps, describe as the aide of the aide of the aide – was promoted over Ms Johal's head. It happened just as a commission bigwig was holding forth publicly about how unfortunate it was that women get penalised if they take a year off. Ms Johal told the tribunal that she had not been informed that there was a vacancy available despite her bosses' promises that she would be "kept in the loop" while she was away.

Whoops! Sounds like she has them bang to rights. Hope she takes them to the cleaners and..

Oh, wait! We’ll be paying that as well, too, won’t we?

"There is something oddly old-fashioned going on in terms of plum jobs at the higher level," one insider said recently.

You mean, despite what it preaches, it’s as much an ‘old boy’s club’ as any other large institution? I’m shocked. Shocked…

In the next few weeks the National Audit Office is expected to deliver a hard-hitting verdict on the commission's finances, and may even qualify its accounts. Its concerns are said to centre on staff who were given generous redundancy payments when the CRE was wound up, then re-hired by the EHRC. Mr Phillips may soon face questions in Parliament.

Questions will be asked in Parliament? The place where, if you get the heave-ho as Speaker due to incredible incompetence, you’re in line for a peerage to make up for it?

That’ll be fun to watch.

More personally embarrassing for Mr Phillips is the rumbling row over his private business activities. Last year he was forced to quit as director of the Equate Organisation, a management company that he founded – and in which he owns a 70 per cent stake – when it was disclosed that it gave advice to Channel 4 following the Jade Goody race row in the 2007 series of Celebrity Big Brother. He was accused of a conflict of interest between his business and his public-sector role. It was also revealed that his contract with the commission – where he is paid £110,000 for a three-and-a-half day week – allowed him to use the commission's offices for a number of exclusively private business activities.

*cough* Smith Institute *cough*

But it seems that Trev has fallen foul of the racemongers within his own organisation by not being PC enough:

…in April three board members resigned after a public assertion by Mr Phillips that the police were no longer institutionally racist. Mr Phillips argued that the police had "shown a much better understanding of how to deliver a public service that doesn't discriminate just because of the colour of your skin" since the botched investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. But this did not go down well with the old guard.

They had already been incensed by his U-turn on multiculturalism – the notion that a diverse society should celebrate the different cultures of its ethnic groups. Multiculturalism, Phillips argued, might actually be counter-productive.

Well, that attitude will never do…

But don’t weep for Trev. Like all cool cats, he’ll find a way of landing on his feet:

There is now talk that his time at the commission may be nearly up. Some are suggesting deal may be done to allow him to save face, by which he will be offered another three years – on the understanding that he will turn it down. He might be offered a job as head of another quango, the British Council, which has a vacancy at the top following the departure of Neil Kinnock who had to quit when his wife, Glenys, was made a minister.

Ahhh. Cozy…