In defence of Priti Patel

We will rue the day we all decided bullying was a bad thing. The consequence is that the inept, the imbecilic and the perpetually frit will hang on to their jobs and we will become a much less efficient country. By bullying I do not mean physically beating someone up and stealing their lunch money, which is what it used to mean when it had a proper meaning. I mean telling someone they’re useless and deserve to be sacked, which is what bullying means today. As R.D. Laing might have put it, that kind of bullying is a rational response to irrationality. The Home Secretary, Priti Patel, who is 5ft 6in tall, has been accused of using bullying behaviour with regard to her civil servants. Nowhere near enough bullying behaviour in my book. One imagines the chagrin amid the Sir Humphreys: ‘I have just been told what to do by a short, state-educated woman from the colonies!’ The fury and loathing turned upon Patel is a foretaste of what awaits government ministers (and advisers) when they dare to tell the civil servants that perhaps things might be done differently from here on in. It is a preliminary skirmish in a war the government must win.

The bitter — and I suspect a little racist and sexist — backlash against Patel came after she had unveiled the government’s new proposals to reduce immigration, something the average voter has been banging on about for 20 years since the doors were flung open — out of political spite and political expediency — by New Labour. Since then we have admitted a net amount of people to this country equivalent to a city the size of Exeter (250,000 people) every year. I — and most voters, according to the polls — would have preferred the net gain, if we had to have a net gain, to have been closer in size to that of the village of Chop Gate in North Yorkshire, pop.