The Home Secretary and the Border Agency

Not sure what to make about the current fuss around the Home Secretary and the Border Agency. Andrew Porter on Newsnight seemed to think it was a serious situation. Keith Vaz MP (also on Newsnight) and Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper (on the Today programme this morning) were also talking the issue up.

But on the whole I can’t see that the Home Secretary is in any difficulty.

Unlike say Kenneth Clarke on prison sentences, no-one is going to believe that Theresa May was secretly “soft” on immigration. As a narrative this is simply not credible. Also no-one is going to be upset about the sacking of a senior civil servant (as a group they are widely assumed, perhaps unfairly, to be devious and manipulative liars).

The grey area seems to be around the nature of the “pilot” that the Home Secretary had introduced and which Brodie Clark (the sacked pseudo civil servant) is supposed to have manipulated and extended without authority.

Was this pilot some kind of clandestine “profiling” of potential terrorists? Profiling at entry points is not currently operated. All arrivals from abroad are treated exactly the same, often leading to long queues at airports and calls for more staff to operate the checks.

If the pilot scheme was a test of profiling then there would be an outcry from civil liberty groups (although the effectiveness of the main pressure group Liberty has been weakened because of tenuous but embarrassing links between its Director and the former Libyan regime).

However it is unlikely that the Home Secretary would be damaged by accusations of civil liberties infringements. If anything, it would enhance her reputation in the popular mind. To paraphrase Wallis Simpson’s famous saying on wealth and dieting – a British Home Secretary cannot be too hard or too ruthless.

PS  I am not a great fan of Evan Davis, presenter on the Today programme.  He seems to lack the professional scorn of John Humphrys or Jeremy Paxman.  But he managed to pin down Yvette Cooper on the issue of entry to the United Kingdom via Dublin (where presumably profiling is in full force?).