Bungling Miss Rudd must up her game

MEMORABLY described as ‘not fit for purpose’ by Labour’s Bellshill bruiser John Reid, the Home Office has a long-standing and well-deserved reputation as a chaotic department and graveyard for political careers.

So the measure of a Home Secretary is less whether some crisis emerges under their watch than how well they respond. By that yardstick, Amber Rudd is performing very poorly indeed.

For many months she ignored the reports showing that Caribbean migrants who lived in Britain for 50 years were being unfairly stripped of their residency rights and encouraged to leave the country.

Yes, she has apologised for the Windrush fiasco and yes, she has taken steps to fix the problem. But the pathetically slow response suggests a minister either out of touch or credulously prepared to accept her officials’ advice that nothing was amiss. Then came her appearance before a committee of MPs on Wednesday, when she denied that her department sets targets for removing illegal immigrants.

Dragged to the Commons yesterday after official reports showed she was wrong, Miss Rudd was forced to admit there were such targets. How could she not know such a basic fact about the functioning of her department? To make matters worse, she then announced this sensible policy – apparently in use for decades – would be abandoned. In doing so she handed ammunition to those on the Left who have sought, cynically, to exploit Windrush to attack all immigration controls.

Given there are, by Home Office estimates, some one million illegal immigrants living in Britain, why shouldn’t officials be set what were extremely modest targets for removing them?

To cap a torrid 48 hours, Miss Rudd then blundered again by refusing to accept, when asked by journalists, that Britain would leave the EU customs union after Brexit, a central tenet of government policy. Once again she was – humiliatingly – forced to correct herself. Irrespective of Brexit, the past 48 hours have compound the impression that Miss Rudd is overpromoted and out of her depth. She needs to get a grip, and urgently.