Dave’s answer to the immigration row? Find a new planet
THE Tory Party is in mess over immigration. But the car crash that was Immigration Minister James Brokenshire’s speech last week – which landed the Camerons’ Nepalese nanny on the front pages – revealed far more than that.
No10 has been fretting that net migration will be higher by the Election than it was in 2010. This is a major liability for the Tories, with UKIP poised to exploit voters’ concerns.
It is migration from other EU countries that is pushing up the figures, and UKIP’s answer is simple: leave the EU. It is, as one Tory Cabinet Minister says, ‘their USP’. The Tories, under their present leadership, are never going to be able to match that.
David Cameron, though, has not helped his cause with his poor choice for the Immigration job. When Mark Harper resigned from the post last month because his cleaner was working in the UK illegally, Cameron – who tries to avoid reshuffles wherever possible – bumped up underwhelming Home Office Minister Brokenshire. This approach may have saved time but it has come at a high political cost.
It has infuriated Ministers who are normally loyal allies. One complains: ‘Immigration is one of the four big subjects for the next year. You need to put a grown-up there.’
But instead, Cameron promoted Brokenshire, a Minister with a tin ear for politics, who has embarrassed himself and his party by pinning the blame for rising immigration on well-off families who hire foreign nannies or cleaners.
One Minister fumes: ‘To lay into the middle classes is just bonkers’. And a No10 source remarks: ‘There should be a function in Microsoft Word that deletes your speech when you start writing about a metropolitan elite.’
No 10 itself, though, can’t escape some of the blame for the fall-out from the speech. Someone in No 10 should have realised that questions were bound to follow about whether Cameron and the rest of the Tory Cabinet had ever employed a foreign nanny, cleaning lady or builders. But there was little chance of that realisation being made when relations between No10 and the Home Office remain dire. There is a lack of trust between Cameron’s people and the Theresa May camp, whom they suspect of being keener to advance the Home Secretary’s interests than the Government’s. The Tories need to get the focus back on to the economy. This week, they will emphasise how Britain’s excellence in science and technology will create the high-paying jobs of the future. As part of this, the Government is to boldly go where no British Government has gone before – by announcing support for a mission to find undiscovered planets.
David Willetts, the Science Minister, will praise the building of a satellite and telescope designed to detect them. The mission might seem a bit out of this world, but it will boost British engineering and our rapidly growing space industry.
Back on Earth, the PM needs to turn his telescope to the flaws that the past few days have laid bare in his operation. If he is to win the Election, he needs everything to go right. He can’t afford more weeks like this past one.