Out of touch on knife crime and blunders on Windrush… a withering verdict on our troubled home secretary
Amber Rudd is well known for being ambitious and has her sights set on Downing Street, but recent mistakes could dash her hopes
OUR ambitious Home Secretary Amber Rudd was called “the Silver Spoon” by her former husband, the sardonic restaurant critic A.A. Gill.
The nickname still fits his former wife to perfection — and never more so than this week.
The Home Office has been sneakily trying to deport members of the Windrush generation of Caribbean immigrants and their children who arrived here in the 1950s.
It was an unspeakably shabby thing to do, as Ms Rudd was forced to admit when she apologised to the Commons on Monday.
“Frankly, some of the ways they have been treated has been . . . appalling and I am sorry,” she said.
But was Ms Rudd really sorry for this “appalling” behaviour? MPs didn’t think so.
Instead, the Home Secretary seemed anxious to shift responsibility on to her junior ministers and Whitehall staff.
She sounded like the lady of a country house blaming her butler for forgetting to decant the claret.
It’s a tone of voice that comes naturally to her — the ex-investment banker spent her childhood in an exquisite 17th Century mansion near Bath.
Ms Rudd moves in the same circles as her brother, the PR schmoozer Roland Rudd, who is one of Britain’s richest and most fanatical Europhiles.
She’s unlikely to encounter a Windrush immigrant as she digs into her quinoa souffle at a Holland Park dinner party.
And I doubt that she has spent much time in Hither Green, the unfashionable London suburb where loathsome career burglar Henry Vincent smashed his way into the house of 78-year-old pensioner Richard Osborn-Brooks, who stabbed him to death in the struggle.
The police arrested Mr Osborn-Brooks and launched a murder investigation. Charges were dropped after thousands of Sun readers signed a petition against this absurdity.
Amber Rudd, meanwhile, maintained her elegant detachment from it all. This is not her world.
Fair enough, you may say. She isn’t the first Tory Home Secretary to grow up in a country house. There’s nothing wrong with that, so long as they roll up their sleeves in government and implement Conservative policies.
But Ms Rudd is not on top of her brief — and that’s putting it politely.
There have now been 60 murders in London this year, meaning it has overtaken New York for homicide rates — and jeopardising the Tories’ reputation as the “party of law and order”.
The near-invisibility of police in rural areas, too, has encouraged burglaries and drug crimes there.
Earlier this month, Ms Rudd went on television to deny that a terrifying 20 per cent annual rise in knife crime and other violent offences in England and Wales had anything to do with cutting police numbers by more than 20,000. Pure coincidence.
Then, the very next day, a leaked Home Office report said the opposite. The police cuts were “likely” to have encouraged the use of guns and knives by street thugs.
The Secretary of State’s response? “I haven’t seen the document. There are lots of documents that go round the Home Office.”
Yes, she really said that — this time in a tone of voice that suggested it was the head gardener’s fault for not telling her about the deer chewing up the flowerbeds.
Say what you like about Theresa May, when she was Home Secretary she worked herself and her civil servants to exhaustion reading every document she could get her hands on.
And she’s a Conservative — traditional in her manners if not always in her policies.
She’ll accept a demure peck on the cheek from a vicar at a garden party, but air-kissing metropolitan Tories make her shudder. Ms Rudd, by contrast, is sailing her sleek yacht under a Conservative flag of convenience. There is a story that has rumbled around Westminster for years that when Rudd decided to enter politics, her only hesitation was over which party to join.
All that interests her is the destination: No 10. The only mystery is why she is so glaringly unsubtle about it.
Ms Rudd has barely hidden her ambition to enter Downing Street.
Earlier this month, The Sun revealed how she hosted a secret fundraiser where millionaire Tory donors paid £2,000 each to attend, amid Cabinet speculation that she has been courting up to 80 backbenchers in preparation for a tilt at Downing Street.
She has been turning up at other MPs’ constituency events to help campaign but also finding time to schmooze with Tory association chairmen who have a key role in choosing the next party leader.
The PM also quipped that David Cameron had warned her to “worry about ambitious female Home Secretaries”.
Rudd has recruited the pollster Lynton Crosby’s firm to run her next election campaign in Hastings and Rye, further fuelling speculation of a leadership bid.
But perhaps most startlingly indicative of her ambition was the grotesquely rude comment she made about Boris Johnson — an often touted possible future leader — during the televised Brexit debates.
In an apparent reference to the ex-London Mayor’s tumultuous love life, she said: “Boris, he’s the life and soul of the party. But he’s not the man you want to drive you home at the end of the evening.”
As for hiring Samantha Cameron’s stylist to boost her “power dressing”? Why doesn’t she just start measuring the curtains for No 10 now. (Answer: Because that’s the housekeeper’s job.)
Fortunately, it doesn’t look as if she will make it to No 10. She can’t power dress her way out of her recent calamities.
And frowning petulantly is hardly going to win over Tory MPs or the Labour Eurosceptics she despises.
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If Amber Rudd wants to sulk, I know just the right place for her — that sour corner of the Tory backbenches occupied by Anna Soubry and other over-promoted Europhiles who can’t contain their fury at the loss of their careers.
If Ms Rudd loses her job, come the election she’ll be defending a tiny majority of 346 in Hastings and Rye. Or possibly not. This is a lady who wants the top job or nothing.
If she falls victim to a reshuffle, she’ll have air-kissed her way out of Westminster long before polling day
- Damian Thompson is associate editor of The Spectator.