Shabana Mahmood has been home secretary for 100 days. In that time, she has moved with unusual speed to tighten the rules on immigration and asylum. Within days of her appointment, she had rewritten the guidelines on appeals against deportation under the Modern Slavery Act, prompting one civil servant to comment: “The speed of decision-making is something to get used to.”
She has also acted decisively to abolish elected police and crime commissioners – an experiment from the coalition government that increased the manufacture of local politicians without significantly improving policing. And she is expected to reorganise the police into a smaller number of larger forces next month – a change that has taken so long only because the first draft was sent back as being “not radical enough”.
