‘Equality is personal for me’: Stonewall chair facing whispering campaign
At secondary school in the Cardiff suburb of Ely, Sheldon Mills told his history teacher that he wanted to study law at King’s College London and become a lawyer in the capital.
The teacher, whom Mills has declined to identify, replied: “You will never go to King’s College, Sheldon.”
Mills went to King’s College, where he obtained both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, becoming only the second person from his school to go to university. He then went on to become a solicitor working in competition law for big City law firms, before taking top jobs at regulators the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
Now Mills is understood to be a frontrunner to become chief executive of the CMA. But some ministers are said to be reluctant to sign off on his appointment to the £195,000-a-year job because of his support for transgender and queer people through his role as chair of trustees of Stonewall, the LGBTQ+ charity.
According to the Telegraph, a government source said: “We want to avoid a politically controversial candidate such as Sheldon. We’ve just persuaded them [the CMA] to stop paying money to Stonewall. The last thing we need is a chief executive who is a paid-up supporter. We won’t have him.”
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, which is overseeing the appointment, declined to comment. A spokesperson declined to distance the department from the comments provided to the Telegraph.
Mills is competing for the job against the CMA’s current interim chief executive, Sarah Cardell. But Cardell, who previously served as one of the CMA’s top lawyers, is also reportedly facing opposition from Tories who worry she would be too
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