After the best part of two weeks trying to firefight the Windrush scandal, Amber Rudd is a shell of a human being. Devoid of honour and credibility, her ambition narrowed down to mere survival. Putting one foot in front of the other and keeping on keeping on. One day after another, one blunder after another. She now knows so little she can barely remember her own name. Or what her job is. Her incompetence is now almost total.
For her latest outing in front of the Commons to explain why she had told the home affairs select committee there were no targets for deportations, when a Home Office official had minutes earlier admitted there were, the home secretary came armed with the support of, not just her Home Office team, but also cabinet members Michael Gove and Sajid Javid and several dozen backbenchers. The Tories are desperate for her to keep her job. Not because they believe in her competence but because they know that if she goes, the prime minister is vulnerable.
In any other circumstances, Rudd’s defence would be fairly straightforward. It was nothing to do with me, guv. It was the fault of my predecessor, who was a bit useless. As this is denied her, she is left not waving but drowning. She began by declaring her undying love for the Windrush generation. The home secretary has been doing a lot of hand-wringing loving in recent days. But then she’s got a lot of loving to fit in to make up for the many years when she didn’t give a toss.
After muddying the waters by reaffirming her commitment to getting rid of illegal immigrants – something that nobody had criticised her for – the home secretary got down to the main business. She had been right to say there were no targets for deportations. All that had happened was that a few local branches had gone rogue and started using their own “management performance tools”. AKA ringing a bell in the office whenever a plane took off back to the Caribbean with a deportee on board. Now that she was aware of this she was going to put a stop to it. Tough on targets, tough on the causes of targets.
The shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, stood up, called for Rudd to resign and promptly sat straight back down again having completely forgotten to ask any important questions. Rudd appeared amazed and relieved by this oversight. She had been expecting to be asked how it was that branch offices were able to work out their own targets if there weren’t national targets from which to extrapolate. Not to mention the obvious point that the existence of targets make it far more likely that over-enthusiastic immigration officers won’t be too bothered to find out if the people they harass and chuck out are legal or illegal.
Thereafter, Tory after Tory crossed their fingers, prayed for forgiveness and lauded the home secretary for her great wisdom. This collective act of self-deception extended well beyond the usual suspects of the two Philips – Davies and Hollobone, who blamed the liberal metropolitan elite for making a lot of fuss about nothing – to Anna Soubry who felt that Rudd had just been led astray by Labour’s own obsessions with targets when in government.
Rudd fell on these interventions gratefully, constantly reaffirming her devotion to the Windrush generation, while conveniently ignoring both the fact that targets only became an issue when the hostile environment policy was introduced in 2013 and that a half-conscious home secretary would have known what was going on in her own department. It took Labour’s David Lammy to yet again point out that MPs had been raising these problems for years and had consistently been brushed off with a “whatever” by the Home Office.
“There are impact statements that have been ignored, there are letters from MPs and she said she wasn’t aware of a pattern,” Lammy observed. “We now understand people have been removed because of targets and she said she didn’t know. I say with all conscience is she really the right person to lead this office of state?”
Rudd knew she was in the middle of a seemingly never-ending car crash – hours later she would say she was abolishing internal targets that she had again said didn’t exist – but had no option but to press on. “I am the right person,” she insisted, yet again fighting her natural urge to resign. She may even be right. Though that said more about the lack of talent in the Tory party than her own competence.