Uk politics

Theresa May's tragicomic run of rotten luck continues. Amber Rudd has self-deported to the backbenches and the Prime Minister will have to find a credible replacement at a moment of acute strife. Why anyone would want the job is a mystery to most of us, but then we lack that combination of ambition and self-delusion essential to political life. The Home Office is where potential is thrown on the rack and brutalised, where careers go to die slow, ignominious deaths; it is Whitehall's ultimate hostile environment. (Ministers disagree and began speculating about a Rudd return with unseemly haste. They may be right but they could at least feign a bout of reflection and contrition.) Home Secretaries enter the office with one of two mindsets.

Alastair Campbell denies that he ever said that no Cabinet Minister can survive a negative story lasting ten, eleven or 14 days. But even if he didn’t say it, it is not a bad rule and one that Amber Rudd has fallen foul of. Rudd’s resignation is a result of the fact that more and more keeps coming on this story, and she is now faced with admitting that she either deliberately misled parliament or really didn’t know what was going on. She has gone before Monday’s statement in the Commons which would have been an exceptionally difficult moment for her. At some point, there is only so much a senior minister can take before there position becomes untenable, as I say in the podcast (click below). Her departure causes multiple problems for Theresa May.

I am living in Paris in the unofficial role of Diplomatic Wag. Though since I am neither wife nor girlfriend, but fiancée, or, in best Franglais, la vielle balle et chaîne, I have been searching for a new acronym. Foho (Foreign Office Hanger On)? Andy is a ‘Directeur de SIN’, a demonic job description out of C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. SIN is the government’s Science and Innovation Network, promoting collaboration between international scientists. There is goodwill in laboratories on both sides of the Channel to go on working together post-You-Know-What. Brexit is pronounced to rhyme with Brigitte, as in Bardot. Parisians ask if you’re American or English and when you say English they bring up Brexitte.

When the Windrush scandal broke, it was largely seen as Theresa May's fault, given the Prime Minister had introduced the hostile environment policy when she was Home Secretary. But this week, the focus has shifted to Amber Rudd, and whether she knew what was going on once she took over the role. This afternoon the Guardian has a leak which suggests Rudd's grip on her department is even weaker than we'd previously thought. Following a chaotic 24 hours in which the Home Secretary told MPs on the Home Affairs Committee that there were no Home Office targets for immigration removals and then corrected herself in the Commons the following day, the newspaper has now published a secret memo which suggests Rudd was wrong to say she did not know about these targets.

Dominic Raab has found himself the subject of much mockery today after one of his aides allegedly told an undercover reporter about his rather repetitious lunch habits: ‘He has the chicken Caesar and bacon baguette, superfruit pot and the vitamin volcano smoothie, every day. He is so weird. It’s the Dom Raab Special.’ Happily, Mr S's mole reports that he has not been put off – he was spotted back in Pret this lunchtime. Still, just so he is not alone – Mr S has reached out to MPs, ministers, SpAds and staffers to discover the eating habits of Westminster's big beasts: Sadiq Khan: The Mayor of London varies his lunches – in part because he is so often our about – but he always tries to have a fruit salad.

Amber Rudd must, privately, be hopping mad about the Windrush row. Not only is she having to defend policies that her predecessor and now boss introduced when she was Home Secretary, she is also having to try to resolve the mess that was exacerbated by Number 10 in initially refusing a meeting with Commonwealth leaders about the matter, and then made worse still by Caroline Nokes' interview suggesting that people had been wrongly deported when there was no such evidence of this happening. That's not to say that Rudd doesn't have her own questions to answer: as she argued herself this afternoon when before the Home Affairs Committee, while the principle of the hostile environment immigration policy may well be right, the practice has been wrong. Her session was not a comfortable one.

At Cabinet today, ministers discussed the fallout from the Windrush scandal. I understand that Boris Johnson made the point that there needed to be a broader immigration amnesty for long-standing Commonwealth immigrants. He argued that this was necessary to prevent others from getting caught up in the same situation, having to produce overly onerous amounts of evidence to show that they have been living here for years. Obviously, this amnesty wouldn’t apply to those with a criminal record. I’m told that Theresa May then rather acidly remarked that Boris had previously called for an amnesty for all immigrants, which he did first in 2008 and then again in 2016 when he privately proposed one for those who had been here for over a decade.