Theresa May has taken the heat out of Home Office rows

Theresa May will give a statement to the House of Commons this afternoon on the disappearance of terror suspect Mohammed Ahmed Mohammed. The Home Secretary has earned a formidable reputation over the past few years for emerging unscathed from a variety of Home Office rows, and Labour has struggled to lay a finger on her.

But this afternoon May will face a grilling from Yvette Cooper over the TPIM arrangements for Mohammed Ahmed Mohammed, and Labour wants to use this incident as a way of claiming that the Home Secretary’s own policy is flawed. Cooper said this morning that ‘given the long-standing concerns about the replacement of control orders, the limitations of TPIMs, and the pressures on monitoring and surveillance, the Home Secretary needs to provide rapid information about the extent and adequacy of the restrictions on Mohammed Ahmed Mohammed and ask the independent reviewer David Anderson to investigate urgently what has happened and the adequacy of the controls and powers in this case’.