THE former Northern Ireland minister, Baroness Denton, has claimed that a senior civil servant advised her "to pack my bags and leave" earlier this year during a controversy over the handling of a sectarian harassment case in her private ministerial office.
"He shared the advice that the best way to deal with it was to pack my bags and leave because he'd seen other ministers broken by such pressure," she told the BBC television programme, Hearis and Minds, last night.
She said she was surprised when the Hayes Report on the affair came out recently to discover that she had no constitutional powers and that "minister" was only a courtesy title.
