With his record we are happy to be rid of ‘Sir Calamity’
NO Government department has failed more miserably than the chronically dysfunctional Home Office. It has long been a byword for mismanagement and warped priorities.
In 2006 the tough-minded Labour Home Secretary John Reid described the organisation as “not fit for purpose” and those words still ring true. In its central duties of protecting the public and upholding Britain’s borders, it is a disgrace.
Yet the mandarins refuse to embrace genuine reform, as the experience of Priti Patel demonstrates. Since the energetic Brexiteer was appointed Home Secretary last summer, the Home Office establishment has systematically tried to undermine her, particularly through poisonous briefings.
At the weekend, this hostility came to a head with the resignation of the department’s top civil servant Sir Philip Rutnam. In an unprecedented statement to the media, he attacked Patel, claiming that her conduct included “shouting and swearing, belittling people, making unreasonable and repeated demands”. As he embarks on legal action for wrongful dismissal, it now seems clear that he aims to bring her down.
Opponents of the Tory Party are revelling in the turmoil. They believe that both Patel and her tough line on immigration are doomed.
BUT they should not be too smug. In any forthcoming fight, neither Sir Philip nor the Home Office have much credibility. He is a classic Whitehall figure with a deeply unimpressive record.
As the senior official at the Department for Transport, he presided in 2012 over the West Coast Main Line franchise fiasco, which a subsequent review found to be littered “with deeply regrettable and completely unacceptable mistakes”. He was also criticised for the ballooning costs of HS2 and flaws in the Network Rail improvement programme.
Taking the helm at the Home Office in 2017, he was soon embroiled in Windrush, where the Government threatened scores of British citizens with deportation over lack of documentation about their status. Yet it was the Home Secretary Amber Rudd who had to quit.
His defenders now act as if the Home Office is a RollsRoyce whose smooth functioning is put in danger by the reckless antics of Patel. But in truth the department is a clapped-out banger needing urgent repairs. The Home Secretary may be impatient with her officials, but she has every right to be. If they do not want to be hectored, then they should start implementing the Government’s policy instead of thwarting it.
The former head of the civil service Lord Macpherson moaned yesterday that the Tories “used to want to preserve our great institutions. Now they are hellbent on destroying them”. But the Home Office is nothing like a “great institution”. On the contrary, it continually lets down the British public. Awash with progressive ideology, it is reluctant to maintain our borders or punish criminals.
For more than a decade, mass immigration has been running at over 600,000 every year. At the same time, thanks partly to enfeeblement of the Home Office, crime is soaring, up 7 per cent in the last year alone, with violence up by 12 per cent.
PRITI Patel is hardly the first Home Secretary to feel despair. Michael Howard, appointed to the job in 1993, once told me of his dismay at his first briefing from civil servants, who showed him a graph of inexorably rising crime into the future, as if nothing could be done about it
An adviser to David Blunkett, who became Home Secretary in 2001, said that the place “was a giant mess”, a point reinforced by a scathing report in 2006 from the National Audit Office, which stated that the department’s accounts could not be verified because it “had not maintained proper financial books and records”.
In yet another shambles, Blunkett’s successor Charles Clarke was forced to resign after incendiary revelations about the Home Office’s pathetic failure to deport a large number of foreign criminals.
Tellingly, it showed far more zeal in 2008 after leaks of documents to Tory front-bencher Damian Green that exposed the ineffectiveness of border controls. Displaying a robustness that it rarely showed towards criminals or illegal migrants, the Home Office launched a heavyhanded investigation that resulted in the arrest of Green.
Theresa May survived so long as Home Secretary partly through her subservience to officialdom. But the consequences for crime and immigration were disastrous. Whatever the moans of the mandarins, change is desperately needed.
‘The Home Office is not a RollsRoyce. It’s a clapped-out banger’