The Home Office has long been the valley of the shadow of death. Even Amber Rudd’s ability and closeness to Theresa May could not protect her from a policy that her prime minister had insisted she enforce and defend. By Sunday night, the only victor was the English language. “We don’t have targets for removals” crashed head-on into “a target of achieving 12,800 enforced removals”. It was no contest.
Rudd was a popular and able minister. Her supporters have been grasping at linguistic niceties. They protested that ambitions and aims were not targets, that local was not national, and that ministers could not read every email. But the Windrush scandal has made the entire removals policy toxic. Politics has a way of wiping slates clean. It shouts: “You are responsible – go.”
May must have known from the start that Rudd’s statement to the home affairs committee last week was untrue. Immigration targets were her policy and removals were built into them. Targets of all sorts were her obsession. She campaigned on them at two general elections. She lived and breathed them. Their populist appeal enabled her to survive at the Home Office longer than anyone this century. Now they have come back to haunt her and she must, in some shape or form, answer for them, as she gazes at the wreck she has made of her friend’s career.
The prime duty of a new home secretary – and it should be explicit – is to end the “hostile environment” specifically to encourage removals, which is a separate target from immigration. As anyone with experience of its hostility will attest, it employed bureaucratic persecution – in effect flagrant maladministration – as a way of getting rid of so-called “low-hanging fruit”. That such Kafkaesque devices should be used by British civil servants goes far beyond “policy”. Not just ministers but Home Office officials have also indulged in unprofessional and unethical behaviour. They should be investigated.
May has now lost a key supporter as she approaches the most delicate year of her already delicate time in office. Home secretaries can be replaced, but Rudd was more important to May as a leading backer of “flexible” Brexit. Within the year, there has to be a showdown over some form of customs union. There is no alternative and no evidence that a rejection of open borders with the EU is what the public wants. Yet May appears trapped, almost mesmerised, by the Brexit wing of her cabinet and parliamentary party.
Rudd’s resignation could yet be seen as a move from headquarters to rally May’s troops at the parliamentary front in the storms that lie ahead. British politics is almost impossible to read, but I sense we have not seen the last of Amber Rudd.
• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist