I think she's just a bile-spitting fanatic tbh.
I think yours is the reason for what
izz describes. She comes across to me as someone with such an obsessive need for control that anything that looks to her like defiance of authority provokes an immediate reaction. Taking the knee might not actually be "defiance of authority" (although it is effectively that), but she's going to see it as sufficient evidence of a lack of deference, surely the start of the slippery slope to defiance proper, and therefore highly undesirable.
Assuming that she doesn't actually hold racist views herself, and sees it as being in direct defiance of her, personally. It would seem plausible.
Priti Patel suffers, I suspect, from a condition we might call "not quite as clever as they think they are", and she has the acute variety, where she is dimly aware of this fact. That's why she can never, ever admit fault or error. It's why her immediate response to
any obstacle or challenge is to reach for a bigger stick. I suspect someone caught some serious shit when she made that idiotic number error we're still chuckling about - she couldn't admit to having made a mistake, but it had to be SOMEONE'S fault.
Sadly, our political system seems to have reached a point where forms of psychotic behaviour are a positive advantage to progression.
ETA: when I was studying for my counselling degree, I went to a very entertaining lunchtime lecture entitled "Psychosis as a management competence", where the speaker went through a range of "desirable corporate management behaviours/values", and was able to relate them to various psychotic and neurotic states - narcissism, depersonalisation, even schizophrenia. It all made sense, although I think there was a tacit acceptance that we weren't talking about florid expressions of those conditions. But now...