The home secretary did not see the internal Home Office memo that boasted of exceeding the department’s target for immigration removals, Michael Gove has claimed, as he suggested that Labour had “weaponised” the Windrush scandal to distract from its own row over antisemitism.
The environment secretary, speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday, said Amber Rudd did not receive the document despite it having been copied to her and Brandon Lewis, then immigration minister, and several civil servants and political aides.
The six-page memo, revealed on Friday by the Guardian, says the department had set “a target of achieving 12,800 enforced returns in 2017-18”, boasts that “we have exceeded our target of assisted returns”, and adds that progress had been made on increasing enforced removals by 10%.
The issue has become particularly toxic because of coverage of the Windrush generation of migrants from the Caribbean. Many have been left destitute or homeless, and denied benefits and healthcare because of the Home Office’s “hostile environment” policies targeting migrants.
Backing Rudd’s own claims on Twitter that she had simply missed the document, Gove said: “What we are witnessing is an example of government not functioning as it should have done, and that’s something for which the home secretary has taken responsibility.
“There does seem to be a series of leaks, or sharing with the Guardian in particular, that is designed to serve a particular agenda … There’s a campaign against the government and against the home secretary. What’s not surprising is that this happens at the same time as the Labour party is mired in allegations of it’s failure to deal with antisemitism.”
“This is about politics,” Gove said. “And the focus on whether or not a particular document that was cc’d to a particular address was then put in a particular box at a particular time – and we know it wasn’t – is intended to distract from the difficulties that the Labour party faces with handling prejudice in its own ranks.”
“Labour are attempting to weaponise this. I think that is quite wrong.”
The shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, said Rudd should have been prepared to accept responsibility for what had happened. “I am just surprised that she doesn’t seem to take the issue seriously enough to offer her resignation,” she told Today.
The decision to set a “broad numerical target” could have contributed to the Windrush fiasco, Abbott said. “It wasn’t saying, for instance, we have to have a target for deporting former criminals. The danger is that that very broad target put pressure on Home Office officials to bundle Jamaican grandmothers into detention centres.”
Rudd is to be recalled to give evidence to the Commons home affairs committee, after she responded to the leaked document in a series of tweets late on Friday night insisting she had not seen the leaked memo, “although it was copied to my office, as many documents are”.
She repeated her claim that she “wasn’t aware of specific removal targets” and said: “I accept I should have been and I’m sorry that I wasn’t.”
The Labour chair of the home affairs committee, Yvette Cooper, told Today: “We have obviously been given inaccurate information to parliament twice now. This is a serious concern and I am calling Amber Rudd to come back and give further evidence to the committee.
“I think we will also want to hear from the permanent secretary as well, because this raises some questions about the way the Home Office is operating.”