FEW Home Secretaries or politicians divide opinion so fiercely – but take Priti Patel’s own brand of Conservative politics out of this – and just admire the achievement.
State-educated, youngish (49) for a politician holding high office, the daughter of immigrant family shopkeepers, a smart and canny operator, and now in one of the highest offices of the land.
She is after all only the fourth woman to be home secretary – and many say it is the hardest job in politics, with none of the soft trappings of being in the top job itself.
She is also the first woman from an ethnic minority background – 20 years ago a woman doing this job and one from a minority would have been seen as impossible.
The history books will record all this – and it will outlast all the mutterings about her as an individual and a politician.
You may not agree with her politics, even as a One Nation, middle of the road, not anti-EU Conservative, but she would not have got to the top and stayed there without some very important qualities and talents.
Prime minister Boris Johnson may not say it very directly, but it is clear that he values Patel, both professionally and politically.
Some on that wing of the party may feel we have even missed out on a potential successor to Johnson himself.
The last time the GG2 Power List talked to her – she was a backbench MP, and she was charming, friendly and explained her views very calmly and reasonably. She has even been known to change her mind – she no longer supports capital punishment.
Read some of the liberal press and you expect some firebrand hard-right ideologue more at home in a party well to the Right of the Conservatives – but she did and would argue that she is a true blue – and one in the mould of Margaret Thatcher.
Her book, Britannia Unchained (2012), written with political colleagues Kwasi Kwarteng, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore and Liz Truss is an untrammelled vision of how Britain might be if Thatcherism was in the ascendancy – it isn’t – for now. But three of her co-authors are in the Cabinet with her.
She has always been a Eurosceptic – her shopkeeper father famously stood for UKIP and she has probably always believed that
Britain would be better out than in, but unlike others, she wasn’t going to be a rebel or kick up a huge fuss.
She was and remains loyal to the causes she believes in: hard work, enterprise, low taxes, small government (pandemics aside obviously), choice and freedom.
She entered parliament in 2010, representing Witham, a constituency in Essex and first had spells at the Treasury and then was minister for employment before taking over as Secretary of State for International Development – a department that no longer exists in its own right and has been merged within the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.
She resigned from her post as International Development Secretary in November 2017 for not telling her bosses that she had met Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior figures from the Israeli government on what was a private holiday to the country.
Her friendship with Johnson and her popularity among some rank-and-file Conservatives, especially those who worked on Brexit, meant Johnson brought her back into the fold as home secretary in the summer of 2019.
She replaced Sajid Javid, who moved to his dream position as Chancellor, when Johnson took over the top job following the Conservative Party’s search for a new leader following the fall of May, who was dethroned because few in the party were confident she could deliver a meaningful Brexit and/or a majority at the polls.
Patel was back in the news this Spring, when she put forward new asylum and immigration plans. The government has already reformed Immigration since Britain left the EU and ended free movement – we now have a points system of entry and salary thresholds to stop employers from trying to secure cheap labour from abroad.
Immigration and asylum is always a difficult subject for any government and while much has already been said about the changes, it remains in consultation for now and critics have quickly dismissed it as unworkable and possibly even illegal.
Patel – somewhat responding to the right-wing media ‘to do something’ about people risking life and limb in using little dinghies across the channel to get to UK to claim asylum – has, she believes, come up with a system that is “fair but firm”.
Some strongly dispute there is any real crisis – the numbers of these arrivals are relatively small especially in international comparisons.
Officially nearly 36,000 people applied for asylum in Britain between March 2019 and March 2020. Around 8,000 arrived via boats across the Channel over the same period.
Britain was processing around 100,000 asylum applications around the start of the millennium and countries like Germany still gets far more – it is broadly accepted that around half a million Syrian refugees arrived in Germany between 2015-17.
Patel wants the British government to differentiate between asylum seekers who enter ‘illegally’ (ie through boats and on lorries) and those who use official channels to flee persecution. “Families and young children have lost their lives at sea, in lorries and in shipping containers having put their trust in the hands of criminals.
“The way to stop these deaths is to stop the trade in people that causes them,” said Patel ushering plans in late March to bring a bill to parliament to deal with all this.
Applicants should no longer apply for asylum in Britain, if they are doing so from an EU country – they should apply to the first country that allows them entry, she argued.
“If you illegally enter the UK via a safe country in which you could have claimed asylum, you are not seeking refuge from imminent peril, as is the intended purpose of the asylum system, but are picking the UK as a preferred destination over others,” she explained.
Too many asylum seekers were playing the system – gaming she called it – and causing backlogs – some make last-minute appeals to prevent being deported when their application has failed, she pointed out. Forcibly deporting people is also not easy and during the pandemic numbers have fallen, leading some critics to feel the government isn’t doing enough.
Opponents feel you can’t classify asylum seekers into two groups – those who arrive in Britain ‘illegally’ and those who apply from a non-EU country.
Under the United Nationals Refugee Convention, which the UK is part of, states can’t discriminate against those who may arrive directly and those who have a good cause to apply from some other country. Human rights lawyers would say you can’t categorise one set of asylum seekers as bad and another as good – they are all in need of sanctuary.
Patel’s plan own partly rests on whether other EU countries, most noticeably France, would accept that these refugees should have applied for asylum in France or the first EU nation in which they arrived – perhaps in some cases, Greece.
Many feel the EU should be doing more to clamp down on asylum seekers heading for Britain. Shaun S Bailey, Conservative MP for West Bromwich, said: “The broader issue here is this: Our European neighbours need to step up. It’s as simple as that.”
Patel’s ‘legal asylum seekers’ will be treated quite differently – they will be given more or less permanent residency, in the form of indefinite leave to remain and enjoy almost identical rights and benefits as UK citizens. In the first instance successful applicants will get 30 moth visas and then will then have to be routinely assessed. There is no pathway to citizenship or resident status.
Much of this would probably play out well on the doorsteps of many Tory inclined constituencies – being tough on asylum seekers and immigration is welcomed – regardless of international laws and conventions.
Patel is a shrewd operator and while Johnson may present his liberal credentials more readily – Patel can play the tough cop – tough on undeserving asylum seekers, while publicly lauding those who came here via refugee camps and the like.
Patel made it quite clear that she is pro-immigration and there are still parts of the Right that favour immigration – especially in the wake of our exit from the EU.
“We celebrate those who have come to the UK lawfully and helped build Britain. We always will,” Patel said nodding to those who don’t feel the door should be shut completely – which still plays out well in some parts of the UK electorate.
Another point of contention that rumbled on in the background for much of last year was the bullying allegations levelled at Patel.
It was settled out of court in March 2021, when former top Home Office civil servant Sir Philip Rutman dropped his claim against the government over unfair dismissal.
It was reported that government lawyers had agreed to pay £340,000 to Sir Philip, plus his legal costs.
The Home Office said both parties had agreed it was better to settle than to go through to an employment tribunal hearing in September this year.
“The government does not accept liability in this matter and it was right that the government defended the case,” a Home Office spokesperson said.
An independent report by the Prime minister’s own standards chief Sir Alex Allan concluded that Patel had fallen foul of the ministerial code and she had been a bully in some specific instances. Sir Alex resigned from his post when Johnson backed Patel.
“Her approach on occasions has amounted to behaviour that can be described as bullying in terms of the impact,” Sir Alex pronounced on the affair.
But it was clear to many on Patel’s side that this was a clash of cultures and the fault being on one side and compounding a difficult situation. Sir Alex said: “The home secretary has also become – justifiably in many instances – frustrated by the Home Office leadership’s lack of responsiveness and the lack of support she felt in the Department for International Development (Dfid) three years ago.
“The evidence is that this has manifested itself in forceful expression, including some occasions of shouting and swearing.”
Sir Alex said, “the civil service itself needs to reflect on its role during this period”.
Johnson exonerated Patel and said he had full confidence in his home secretary.
Patel for her part did apologise for her behaviour, arguing that she was not supported by her department and that issues that might have been seen as bullying by some, had not been raised with her and “any upset I have caused was completely unintentional,” she pointed out. Once certain issues had been raised, she changed her behaviour and Sir Alex acknowledged that relations had much improved.
“I note the finding of different and more positive behaviour since these issues were raised with her,” declared Sir Alex.
Much of this saga has already receded into the background, but another issue that may rise on the political agenda is women’s safety – and the current police bill.
The murder of Sarah Everard, 33, has reawakened the debate about sexual violence and women’s safety. Many want legislation to address issues and the government has talked about employing more plain clothes police officers to patrol streets and bars and improve street lighting and consider other improvements to public amenities that would help curb attacks.
The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill is huge swathe of legislation that covers many aspects of life – from one person protests to better protection against adults who abuse their positions of trust in sports or religious organisations, and life terms being given to child murderers.
The increased powers given to police have drawn the most attention and protests were ongoing this spring and were further highlighted when police broke up a vigil and protest at Clapham Common from women demanding more be done to protect them – scenes of male police officers manhandling women protesters did not look pretty or justified to many – though Met chief Cressida Dick kept her job and Patel staved off calls for her to take action as home secretary.
Patel acknowledged that cultural change might be required to better protect women and that tougher legislation might not address the actual source of conflict and danger in society.
A mother of a 13-year-old son, she told broadcaster Robert Peston on his ITV show Peston that, “I feel very strongly about this, in terms of how we bring up our children.
“And one of the basic, basic principles is respect to each other. That is, respective irrespective of our gender, how we speak to each other and how we treat girls.”
She was born in London and spent her early life in Watford, going to school locally before studying Economics at Keele University and then reading Government and Politics at Keele.
She worked in PR for a large corporate firm and was a senior executive before she found the newly created seat of Witham and came through on an ‘A list’ of candidates created by former prime minister David Cameron. She married Alex Sawyer in 2004.
