During the general election last year, Dame Priti Patel, now the shadow foreign secretary under Kemi Badenoch, did well to be re-elected in Witham, when some 250 other Tory MPs fell by the wayside and the Conservatives were reduced to 121 seats in the Commons.
To be sure, her majority – 15,196 in 2010 when she was first elected; 27,123 in 2015; 18,646 in 2017; and 24,082 in 2019 – was reduced 5,415 on July 4, 2024. But, at least, she has survived to fight another day.
Will she become foreign secretary if Badenoch wins the next election which is itself a big supposition?
British politics is far too volatile to be able to answer that question. However, Dame Priti will remain a relevant figure in British politics if she can demonstrate – not that she is good friends with Nigel Farage – but that she has the backing of the influential 2.5m-strong British Indian community and has allies in the Narendra Modi government in India. Schmoozing the Trump administration won’t help. That field is oversubscribed.
She was born in London on 29 March 1972 to Sushil and Anjana Patel, parents of Gujarati origin who came to Britain in the 1960s, settled in Hertfordshire and ran a chain of newsagents. She studied at a comprehensive school in Watford before taking a degree in economics, sociology and social anthropology at Keele University and a post-graduate diploma in government and politics at Essex.
She joined the Tories as a teenager and was recruited to William Hague’s press office during his leadership, then left politics for a career in public relations. She was placed on David Cameron’s priority A-list of promising candidates and fast tracked to parliament via Witham in 2010.
It was Cameron who recognised the importance of the Indian community in the UK and appointed Patel as his “diaspora champion” during a visit to New Delhi and Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 2013. She broke with Cameron by backing Brexit in the 2016 referendum.
Over the years, she has gained quite a bit of experience in domestic and international politics, though she often got into trouble. Under Cameron, she was exchequer secretary to the treasury from July 2014 to May 2015 and then minister of state for employment from May 2015 until July 2016.
Theresa May appointed her secretary of state for international development in July 2016. All went well at first. May asked Patel to host the Diwali party at 10, Downing Street, as the prime minister herself had to go to Brussels. Patel was also sent to the Hinduja Diwali party. But in November 2017, Patel left the government because she was accused of exceeding her brief and holding unauthorised meetings with senior members of the Israeli government. Today, she is seen a staunch ally of Tel Aviv.
She backed Boris Johnson for the Tory party leadership when May was ousted as prime minister. He gave her one of the great offices of state when he made her home secretary, a post she held from July 2019 until Johnson’s exit in September 2022. She remained on the
backbenches under Liz Truss. Patel backed Johnson to return as prime minister but when he didn’t, she switched her support to Rishi Sunak. But she was not rewarded with a cabinet post.
She has her enemies in Tory ranks. There was a toxic piece by William Atkinson, In ConservativeHome, which claims to reflect the views of Tory party members.
His article asked: “Badenoch knew Patel’s record was disastrous. So why has she hugged her so close?”
“Having only won the votes of 14 MPs in the only round of last year’s leadership election that she survived, Patel was hardly the biggest rival that Badenoch needed to placate,” wrote Atkinson.
He added: “When Patel’s political obituary comes to be written – sooner than she might hope – she will be remembered for two big things: being sacked as International Development Secretary for meeting with Israeli officials without Prime Ministerial approval, and for presiding over the introduction of our most liberal immigration system ever, with disastrous consequences at the ballot box.”
What was being discussed was an interview Patel had given on the Sun’s Never Mind the Ballots with the paper’s political editor, Harry Cole.
“You ended free movement for Europeans and you threw the borders open for the rest of the world!” he raged.
Her reply was actually eminently sensible.
Cole had become apoplectic about the graph which showed migration had reached 1.2m. He claimed jobs had been promised to Sun readers who had voted Brexit. This prepared to be another way of saying: “Foreigners are taking the jobs of Sun readers.”
Patel could have pointed out that the migration figures are falsely inflated by including overseas students, who overwhelmingly return home.
Patel explained there were vital jobs that needed to be filled because Brits were not filling the vacancies: “Brightest and the best coming to our country, people on skilled work visas – it’s legal migration, Harry. (Those) who come and work and contribute to our economy – the brightest and the best. For the first time ever we have a points based immigration system, counting people in and out. You can turn off the immigration system at any stage in terms of what our economy needs and doesn’t need.”
She acknowledged that “the government should have done more – absolutely – on skills and training Brits.”
She tried to explain the 1.2m migration figure was from an exceptional year: “What would you say to the Ukrainians who are in our country? What would you say to the BNOs (British Nationals Overseas, for example, from Hong Kong)?
“These are people who work – (they have used) skilled visa routes – (bringing) all the skills in terms of NHS. People who are working in our National Health Service.”
She gently pointed out: “We had something called the pandemic.”
As for on the graph, she conceded: “I am not fine with it.”
But rejecting Cole’s assertion that foreigners had taken away the jobs of locals, she said: “That is totally distortionary and that’s not true. People who came here in the pandemic – (with) health and social care visas – what would have happened to our NHS (if they hadn’t come)? Are you now saying we don’t need those people in our NHS?”
Patel had to backtrack slightly after Badenoch distanced herself from the shadow foreign secretary’s remarks. The Tory leader’s spokesman said that the Conservatives would “tell the truth about the mistakes we made. While the last Conservative government may have tried to control numbers, we did not deliver.”
Such is the state of politics that Patel was forced to fudge what she had said although she had been completely in the right.
Patel was in the limelight in 2016 when she and her husband, Alex Sawyer, were among the chosen guests at the wedding of newspaper tycoon Rupert Murdoch and Mick Jagger’s ex, Jerry Hall.
