Why is it ALWAYS someone else’s fault, Ms Rudd?

roadcaster david Frost was cruelly asserted to have ‘risen without a trace’.

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the comment contained a substantial element of truth. Frost had got to the top of his profession without doing or saying anything interesting or important.

the same is being said of amber rudd. Plausible and media-friendly, she has had one of the most meteoric ascents in modern political history.

Within five years of entering Parliament in 2010, she was in the cabinet. Within another year, theresa May propelled her to one of the most senior offices of state as Home secretary.

But what was Ms rudd’s political philosophy? What social issues motivated this former venture capital financier with city firm JP Morgan? More importantly, would she be a good home secretary?

Now we are beginning to find out the answers to these questions. I believe they give cause for concern.

Unfortunately, evidence is piling up that amber rudd is a serial bungler and that she lacks the basic skills to deal with the onerous demands of being Home secretary.

among her many responsibilities are homeland security, counterterrorism, policing, borders, immigration, citizenship, fire and rescue services, passports . . . the list goes on and on.

this week, Ms rudd has become caught in the controversy surrounding caribbean migrants who came to Britain to work after World War II. the scandal brings shame to Britain. It has ruined the lives of people who have been declared illegal immigrants after living in this country for more than half a century.

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ADLY, it has cast a damaging shadow over this week’s commonwealth conference in london, hosted by the Queen.

after a hapless performance on Monday, Ms rudd was condemned by MPs for saying the Home office did not know if any Windrush immigrants had been wrongly deported.

eventually, she was forced into a humiliating U-turn — offering help to those involved.

remarkably, too, Ms rudd criticised her boss, Mrs May — a predecessor at the Home office — saying the department back then had been ‘too concerned with policy and strategy and sometimes [lost] sight of the individual’.

It is true that the original problem began when Mrs May called for a ‘really hostile environment’ for illegal immigrants and introduced new rules to identify and expel them.

However, apart from the duplicity of blaming her boss, Ms rudd bears the bulk of the blame for failing to act when the issue was brought to her attention months ago.

Now the politically tone-deaf Home secretary is paying the price. Indeed, this is not the only egregious recent example of her ineptitude.

Her failure to understand this country’s history, culture and its people’s sense of identity was exposed when she allowed the contract for the manufacture of the new post-Brexit British passport to go to a Franco-dutch consortium instead of the Gateshead firm de la rue.

Her decision to let this happen proved she was blind to the fact that changing the passport back from eU burgundy to navy blue — and for it to be manufactured on British soil — was, to millions, a symbolic opportunity to reverse the seemingly endless leaching of powers to Brussels.

as has now become her habit, Ms rudd said the decision was nothing to do with her. even though she personally signed off the deal, she blamed others. likewise, this week, she blamed civil servants for mistakes with the Windrush fiasco.

shame on you, Ms rudd! a cardinal rule of government is that ministers should never attack civil servants, because they don’t make policy and cannot answer back.

the Windrush and the passports affair fit a recent pattern. last week, she insisted that a rise in knife crime was not the result of cuts to police budgets.

However, a report by her own department, which she claimed she hadn’t seen, suggested a link between police cuts and a surge in serious violent crime. oh dear. doesn’t Ms rudd know what is going on in her own department?

to cap it all, we had the farce of events at Hither Green, south-east london, where a 78-year-old man, in bed with his wife who suffers from dementia, confronted armed intruders. after he stabbed the burglar to death, he was arrested on suspicion of murder (though later told no action would be taken against him).

any word from amber rudd? Not a whisper.

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NOTHER area of the Home secretary’s responsibility offers cause for concern. With Brexit imminent and Britain regaining control of our borders at last, Ms rudd does not inspire confidence.

the truth is that she has shown inconsistency over immigration ever since she took the job of Home secretary.

For example, after proposing that companies declare how many foreign workers they employ, she was embarrassed at being unable to say how many foreign employees the Home office had. later, she dropped the plan. (to put it mildly, detail isn’t Ms rudd’s strong point.)

Perhaps her failings can be put down to the fact that, as someone with entrenched europhile instincts, she is struggling to get her head round the post-leave vote world.

In that context, I believe that amber rudd belongs to that easily identifiable type of treacherous conservative politician.

other examples include europhiles chris Patten, Michael Heseltine and the post-war conservative Party chairman rab Butler (who, in 1962, betrayed the trust of Prime Minister Macmillan by wrecking his ‘ Night of the long Knives’ cabinet reshuffle).

these men built up a glorious

reputation for themselves by sucking up to the liberal Leftwing establishment.

Always ready to trash their Rightwing colleagues (most notoriously, during the EU referendum campaign, Ms Rudd described her colleague Boris Johnson as ‘ not the man you want driving you home at the end of the evening’), they are often lauded by the BBC, the Financial Times and The Guardian.

No wonder that the Financial Times has highlighted the Home Secretary’s ‘confident performances’ in the media and has described her as a ‘credible contender for future leader’.

For its part, a breathlessly naive Radio Four profile called her rise ‘unmatched by any other politician since World War II’.

Ironically, the Windrush story offers a telling paradox about Amber Rudd, who loves to show off her bien-pensant views to the London liberal elite.

In this case, however, her department has deeply offended their values — by showing a heartless and arrogant attitude to the children of Caribbean immigrants who came to Britain, at our Government’s invitation, to help rebuild the country and its industry after World War II.

When the headstone is carved for Amber Rudd’s political grave — and it could happen very soon — the words ‘ Windrush’ and ‘ British passports’ will feature prominently.