The business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, has been accused of allowing fake news to flourish after refusing to debunk false claims that civil servants in his department demanded the removal of a portrait of the Queen.
Dave Penman, the head of the FDA senior civil servants union, has claimed that Kwarteng is damaging morale within the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy after ignoring requests to publicly correct reports that staff had replaced the portrait with a smaller picture of the monarch.
