If you had hired as many different builders in the past five years as Britain has hired home secretaries, you would assume your house was deeply flawed. Yet the latest, Suella Braverman, one of four in that time, has managed 10 months under Rishi Sunak and is reportedly under pressure to be sacked. It is hard to imagine how a senior minister in a controversial department can operate when those around her think she is about to go. To put it mildly, the job should be held by someone with the authority to act. The habit of Boris Johnson and now Sunak of using cabinet jobs not as a reward for competence but in return for loyalty has been disastrous. The Home Office is not alone. In the past four years Britain has had six education secretaries and three transport secretaries. No wonder the British government is a mess.
Sunak’s appointing of a hard rightwinger to the high-profile position of home secretary, just a few days after she had been forced to resign from the same post, might have been politically wise had there been a plausible policy in place. On the leading electoral issue of immigration there was not. Whoever dreamed up this month’s headline-grabbing event of “small boats week”, as if it were a yachting festival, should be fired. Tasteless in itself, it became a farce: a diseased prison barge, attacks on migrants’ lawyers, six drowned migrants and a record 756 asylum seekers crossing the Channel in a single day. Meanwhile Braverman daily commits herself to unattainable targets and makes absurd accusations that immigration is all Labour’s fault.
