No job in government has its path so strewn with banana skins as that of Home Secretary. A missing criminal, slippery detainee or foreign terrorist can end a ministerial career. And with tens of thousands of people going in and out of the country daily it can happen at any moment. The Home Office has become the department where political careers go to die. There is a reason for this. As John Reid famously said of the Home Office’s immigration operation, it is quite simply ‘not fit for purpose’. Five years on from that bleak assessment, the situation has not improved.
A case this summer highlighted the problem. In June the Home Secretary barred the Israeli-born Palestinian cleric Raed Salah from entering the UK, deeming his presence ‘not conducive to the public good’. But the speaking tour that Salah intended to conduct began on schedule. He had landed at Heathrow and passed without a hitch through Customs and Immigration.
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