What Tories can learn from Theresa May’s mistakes on immigration

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias is often taught to schoolchildren, who read it as a warning about the fragility of human power. Conservatives should study it now and ensure they take an opportunity to learn from Theresa May’s mistakes on immigration.

If there was one issue that helped May become, for a short time, a figure of “cold command” over her party, it was immigration. As home secretary and then Prime Minister, she was the senior figure at the top of the Conservative party who consistently took the hardest line on the issue. By the mid-point of the 2010-2015 coalition government, David Cameron would privately concede that all of his ministerial colleagues no longer believed in the Conservatives’ “tens of thousands” target, with the solitary exception of May.

After succeeding Cameron in No 10, May stuck to that pledge even though she was once again alone in Cabinet in thinking it wise.

She also framed her entire Brexit strategy around her conviction that most of the electorate would always demand the hardest line possible on migration: the starting premise for the “red lines” she set out in the autumn of 2016 was that freedom of movement must end, a condition that meant Britain must leave the Single Market.