Priti Patel is the British Home Secretary. This means she is responsible for things like prisons, the police and immigration control. She comes from a Hindu background, and her parents were ethnic Indians forced out of Uganda by Idi Amin in the early 1970s. In terms of politics she is a right-winger, who supported Britain leaving the European Union, and who in the past had supported the reintroduction of the death penalty.
A few years back, when she was in charge of the International Development department, she was forced out for having unauthorized and secret contact with Israeli government officials. So it is reasonable to think that she is pro-Israel. More recently, there is a controversy about her treatment of Sir Philip Rutnam, a senior civil servant in the Home Office. He was quoted in the The Guardian as saying that he was a “target of [a] vicious and orchestrated campaign against him”, “orchestrated” by Priti Patel.
The Guardian has now published an article which attempts to uncover the true Priti Patel. I have copied from this article 12 quotations, which give an idea about what kind of person she is supposed to be. It should be noted that The Guardian is a leftwing newspaper, that is no friend of the current Home Secretary. Here are the quotes:
1. “The story goes like this: when the news that Priti Patel had stepped down as international development secretary spread through her department, some civil servants burst into an impromptu singalong of Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead”.
2. “While largely told secondhand, the vignette illustrates a current political truth about Patel, that someone who not many years ago was regularly tipped as a future prime minister is now among the most divisive figures in Westminster”.
3. “Some former colleagues, even opposition MPs, speak of her as approachable, friendly and self-deprecating. But certain civil servants and officials tell a very different story”.
4. “While the word ‘bullying’ is used, with her it’s not really personal, as if she took a dislike to certain people, it was her typical manner. One minute she would come across rude or ungrateful, and another she would be being dismissive or hostile in the face of advice”.
5. “I think she’s been careful about how she’s presented herself all these years. And she can be the most charming person, people feel drawn to her.”
6. “A reputation for being a bully”.
7. “Notorious for being very nice, friendly and happy to help”.
8. “A career-long Eurosceptic, she holds views on law and order sufficiently robust that she famously spoke in favour of the death penalty on the BBC’s Question Time in 2011, a view she now disowns”.
9.”While she is, in ministerial terms, just one step away from No 10, Patel is now rarely talked about as a future PM, despite a capacity for hard work and the ability, even acknowledged by her enemies, to be hugely charming”.
10. “Nice, normal and fun… she always seemed like one of those MPs who doesn’t take it all too seriously…”.
11. “The lowering of expectations for her career seems to have several causes. One is a seeming capacity for political misjudgment, notably her extracurricular visit to Israel, which baffled and outraged May and her team”.
12. “She is an extremely motivated and demanding boss, sure, but also incredibly kind… the allegations of bullying [are] ridiculous”.
We can extract from these quotations a number of keywords, which I have ordered from least to most favourable. The ordering reflects my bias about the desirability of the listed descriptions and qualities:
Witch
Bully
Rude
Ungrateful
Dismissive
Hostile
Divisive
Misjudgement
Demanding
Hard work[ing]
Motivated
Fun
Self-deprecating
Help[ful]
Charming
Approachable
Nice
Friendly
Let’s now set up Priti Patel’s horoscope. I don’t know her time of birth, so it is set for March 29 1972, in London, at Midday:
Priti Patel’s horoscope does bear out some of the negative comments about her. She has no planets in Water signs – in other words, nothing in Cancer, Scorpio or Pisces. People with no Water can be harsh, and they can miss the emotional niceties that help human relations run smoothly. When you throw in the Sun and Mercury in Aries, you get the picture of someone who wants to act now this minute, without fully understanding how other people are going to respond. Bear in mind also that Mercury in Aries just says what’s on its mind, without thinking too much about the consequences.
There are other signatures of harshness. Priti Patel has a Mars-Saturn conjunction in Gemini. People with Mars-Saturn conjunctions often see the world as a tough place, where you have to struggle to keep your head above water. Then you have her Jupiter in Capricorn. Jupiter is fallen in Capricorn, and people with this placement often focus on material and practical things, in a way that can seem mean and selfish. Adolf Hitler and Margaret Thatcher both had Jupiter in Capricorn.
We can now start to put together the negative key words that have been associated with her. Someone who is a bully, who is rude, hostile and divisive. Yes, Aries wants its way, and Mercury in Aries and Mars in Gemini can communicate in a way that causes a lot of hurt. Mars in Gemini can also be divisive, particularly if it is conjunct Saturn. Gemini is probably the most divisive sign of the Zodiac – it likes to split and categorize. So a lot of Patel’s energies may go into creating divisions, and perhaps seeing things in terms of friends and enemies.
And we then have the witch. I remember when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, wondering what would happen if I threw a bucket of water at her. Perhaps, like the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, she would have dissolved. And if I had been arrested for soaking the then Prime Minister, would I have been charged with attempted murder, it it could be shown that I had the intention of killing her? I wasn’t the only one who associated Margaret Thatcher with the Wicked Witch of the West, and when she died many on the left chanted Ding Dong the Witch is Dead, like the Munchkins in the movie.
But we do have to be careful about using the word “witch”. It is a word that is exclusively used to describe women, and it is without doubt derogatory. In the context of Priti Patel and Margaret Thatcher, they are described as witches because they are or were in positions of power, and female leaders have to deal with the kind of double standards described by Alice Eagly and Steven Karau in their 2002 paper “Role Congruity Theory of Prejudice Toward Female Leaders”. Essentially, female leaders are treated by a different set of standards than male ones. Male leaders are allowed to be tough and agentic, but female leaders are not. Instead, females in positions of power are supposed to be collaborative in their leadership, and perhaps also touchy-feel. And when female leaders behave against society’s gender expectations, they often get slammed. Indeed, they sometimes get called witches.
Yet it we compare Margaret Thatcher and Priti Patel’s charts, we do notice that Thatcher had one traditional planet in a Water sign – which was Saturn in Scorpio. It was better than nothing. This compares with Priti Patel’s total absence of Water, which leads to the keyword of “misjudgement”. Her misjudgements are, I believe, about her inability to fully understand the emotional environment in which she works. People have feelings, and she has to make a greater effort to listen to them. Or get someone else to do it for her.
As far as the positive traits are concerned, someone has described her as “fun”. She has a Sun-Mercury conjunction in Aries. This conjunction will exacerbate her capacity for misjudgement, but it will also give her personality a fiery dynamism, which could make her an exciting and fun person to have around. Though we shouldn’t forget her Jupiter in Capricorn. Fun has its limits, and she never forgets the hard work that needs to be done.
Going back to Aries, I want to return to a critical quotation from The Guardian: “While the word ‘bullying’ is used, with her it’s not really personal, as if she took a dislike to certain people, it was her typical manner”. This fits an Aries who has no Water. Aries is a fast moving sign, which doesn’t have time to have personal grudges. She doesn’t bully because she doesn’t like someone, it is because they are trying to slow her down.
We then have to explain the helpful, charming, approachable and nice side of Priti Patel’s personality. Well, she was born on the day of a Full Moon. The definition of a Full Moon is when the Sun and Moon are opposition each other, from the Earth’s perspective. Her Sun is in Aries, her Moon in the opposite sign of Libra. Or should I say it is probably in Libra. If she was born after 2.42 am local time it would be in Libra, so there is close to a 90% chance of her having the Moon in this sign, rather than the previous one of Virgo.
Anyway, assuming she was born after 2.42 am, we have a Full Moon personality, who switches between the traits of Sun in Aries and the Moon in Libra. This happens with Full Moon people – they move from one sign to another, very quickly. One moment she can be Aries, desperate to get her way as fast as possible, the next moment Libra, accomodating and approachable. I believe that this dichotomy is the fundamental issue that the The Guardian article was struggling to explain.