Home is where the trouble is

26 May 06
PHILIP JOHNSTON | Who would be home secretary? Who would want to be? Even though it is considered one of the great offices of state, alongside foreign secretary and the chancellor, it rarely provides a stepping stone to the very top.

Who would be home secretary? Who would want to be? Even though it is considered one of the great offices of state, alongside foreign secretary and the chancellor, it rarely provides a stepping stone to the very top.

In the past 100 years or so, only two home secretaries — Winston Churchill and James Callaghan — went on to become prime minister.

Promising careers have been wrecked on the department’s jagged reefs, which always lurk just below the surface ready to tear a hole in the toughest political hide. In recent years, Charles Clarke and David Blunkett have foundered on its rocks; Michael Howard came perilously close to sinking in the mid-1990s; before him Kenneth Clarke was assailed by botched police reforms and Kenneth Baker by dangerous dogs.

In 1982, Willie Whitelaw was on watch when an intruder entered Buckingham Palace and sat on the Queen’s bed. His offer to resign was turned down, but had the worst happened, the whole government might have fallen.

Callaghan, who had the Kenyan Asian exodus and the start of the Troubles in Northern Ireland to deal with, once observed that the post ‘is the stuff of newspaper headlines: drugs, football hooligans, gambling, pornography, prison escapes, demonstrations, police behaviour, treatment of immigrants’.

So, when John Reid, the latest holder of the poisoned chalice, appeared before the Commons home affairs select committee on Tuesday after just a fortnight in the job, he was already bloodied and a bit (though only a bit, given his characteristic self-confidence) chastened.

Everything had been chucked at him since he had succeeded Clarke. He felt as though he had been in the post for two years. The wide responsibilities of the Home Office meant that no sooner had a fire been dampened in one corner of the woods than another had blazed into life elsewhere.

Reid wanted some respite to get on top of the foreign prisoners fiasco but had not bargained on fresh revelations about illegal immigrants working at the Home Office, police opposition to constabulary mergers, prisoners walking out of jail and innocent people being unable to get work because the Criminal Records Bureau held incorrect information about them.

Reid’s response to this barrage has been instructive. To begin with, he went native. When Dave Roberts, the head of the removal section at the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, went before the select committee to admit he had not the ‘faintest idea’ how many illegal immigrants there were in the country, Reid’s initial reaction was to rubbish the stories.

He then made the mistake of rushing off to Channel 4’s studios on the night the TV station disclosed that five Nigerian illegal immigrants were working as cleaners in the Home Office to state confidently that they had been intercepted early in a manner that showed the system was working well. The speed with which he tried to stop this story developing was ill-advised since he could not possibly have had enough time to check out the details. Sure enough, it turned out that the cleaners had worked for the department for some time.

This episode might well have been responsible for what happened next. Reid had been severely embarrassed because he unwisely took the information he was given at face value. He carried out an instant audit into the operation of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, including making an unannounced visit to Lunar House, its HQ in Croydon, and was horrified at what he discovered.

By the time he appeared before the select committee, he was ready to deliver an extraordinary indictment of the department. Any pretence that the IND was anything other than dysfunctional was stripped away. It was hopeless from top to bottom. Nothing less than an overhaul would suffice; and he was the man to do it.

If the home secretary is now prepared to abandon the instant rebuttal posture that the government always adopts in response to criticism, then he has learned a very important lesson. He has made it clear that he intends to get a grip on the department, moving Tony McNulty from his post in charge of immigration as a signal of intent.

Furthermore, he has made a priority of public protection and seems less enamoured of structural changes, such as police mergers or grandiose criminal justice reforms, than his predecessors.

It is to be hoped that such tough talk is not merely ‘reverse’ spin. When things go wrong in the Home Office, as they always will, the important thing is for ministers and officials to address its failings — not go around blaming the media for having the temerity to expose its incompetence.

If Reid has his eye only on tomorrow’s headline, he will find to his cost that the story has changed before the day is out.

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