Is Shabana Mahmood ‘one of the best Conservative Home Secretaries we have ever had’? Tory MP Edward Leigh thinks so. The Father of the House lavished praise on the Home Secretary in the Commons yesterday after Mahmood announced a ban on the annual al-Quds Day march. He isn’t the only right-winger to fall for Mahmood.
Many have failed to clock how unpopular Mahmood has become with her own party
Since her promotion to the Home Office, Mahmood has focused on restricting immigration, lengthening settlement periods and requirements for long-term migrants, limiting refugee status, offering money for voluntary departures and banning visas from certain countries. She has won plaudits from many right-wingers, with much happy fantasising about her ‘Blue Labour’ credentials, and a little idle speculation about her succeeding Keir Starmer
With legal immigration tumbling down, the Home Secretary seems to be a success, a rare bright spark amid a cabinet of mediocrities. But saying that Mahmood is the soundest Labour minister is like saying Albert Speer was the least bad Nazi – hardly a ringing endorsement. Those right-wingers flocking to her standard should disabuse themselves.
For conservative-minded gentlemen of a certain age, there is a thrill that comes from an ethnic minority woman reflecting their opinions: see Badenoch, Kemi. But her right-wing fans should look at her output. For all her tough words about uncontrolled immigration ‘tearing our country apart’ or triggering pearl-clutching by revealing she has been called a ‘fucking Paki’, her migration policies leave much to be desired.
As the great and noble Chris Bayliss and Guy Dampier have pointed out, Mahmood’s immigration reforms are less robust than her hearty speech-making suggests. Despite fellow Labour MPs wailing at her ‘performative cruelty’, Mahmood has tinkered at the edges when it comes to graduate visas, English standards, visa bans for specific countries and fast-tracking settled status for public sector workers. If volunteering in your community enables you to shave three years off your wait for Indefinite Leave to Remain, can she really be considered harsh? The boats continue to come; the ECHR remains un-exited; hundreds of thousands of migrants arrive annually; demographic tensions continue to grow.
Mahmood has only continued down a path of greater stringency already plotted out by Robert Jenrick and James Cleverly; she is a Conservative Home Secretary only in the sense that she is following in the footsteps of Tory predecessors who combined the colossal goof of the Boriswave with an inability to stop Channel crossings. With Reform promising mass deportations, Nigel Farage is not quaking in his boots.
Nonetheless, Mahmood provides the right vibes. I have met many of the ‘Blue Labour’ types; I would very much like to live in Maurice Glasman’s England. But for all the high-falutin’ talk about belonging, community, reconnecting with t’workers and sticking two fingers up at the Lanyard Class, it always seemed to be a romantic exercise in painting a pretty picture not a serious programme for government. Mahmood has tried to provide that: appeal to Reform voters by getting tough on immigration. But even her deceptively stringent measures are too much for the average Labour member. She will never be Prime Minister.
Blinded by their own reverence for her, many have failed to clock how unpopular Mahmood has become with her own party. The LabourList cabinet league table has her fourth from bottom on +3. By contrast, Ed Miliband sits pretty on +70. In a head-to-head against Starmer in a leadership contest, she would muster the support of only 16 per cent of party members. Miliband, Andy Burnham, Angela Rayner and even Wes Streeting would win by health margins. Progressive activists really don’t like controlling immigration, even when it’s done by a Muslim woman. Any budding Labour leader would win plaudits by promising to sack Mahmood and scrap her agenda.
Right-wingers might fulminate that this would mean abandoning any hope of Labour winning back voters from Reform. But most activists are looking over their shoulders at Zack Polanski, not Farage. They want wealth taxes and Gaza protests, not tightening visa requirements. They look at a polity as fractured as ours and bet that if Labour can win back a chunk of the progressive vote, they can win the next election on 30-odd per cent, without having to make all the grubby compromises with swing voters a Reform-facing strategy would entail.
One wishes Mahmood well in proving the best of a bad bunch. But one also expects she will be a footnote in this government. If Labour MPs do eventually pluck up the confidence to replace their hate chief, Mahmood will either be shuffled into a less important position or dispatched to the backbenches. There she can spend more time protesting at a Sainsbury’s and calling for boycotts of Israeli goods, in a desperate to keep her seat from a Gaza enthusiast in 2029 – a part of her past that her new right-wing devotees studiously ignore.
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