Priti Patel is the new Home Secretary. This is likely to attract a fair bit of opprobrium from Boris Johnson’s critics, given she is a supporter of the death penalty. Whether or not she has been given any remit to examine that particular policy issue, she has a big job on her hands.
The Home Office is one of the hardest departments to run. Theresa May managed to survive it, largely by micromanaging everyone else into the dust. Her successor Amber Rudd did not, finding that obeying her boss too well led to her being implicated in the Windrush scandal. Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, May’s aides in the Home Office and then in Number 10, would constantly tell friends that they were always trying to avert disaster in the department or one of its agencies. Everyone who has worked there describes a feeling akin to sitting on a volcano that hasn’t erupted for a number of years: there is always the chance of a huge policy disaster that you just didn’t see coming.
Johnson has made clear that one of his priorities is to restore police numbers, promising in Downing Street this afternoon that ‘my job is to make your streets safer – and we are going to begin with another 20,000 police on the streets’.
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