Home Office reshuffle: tidying up or rearranging deckchairs?
Following the resignation of immigration minister Robert Jenrick, the government has made changes to the allocation of responsibilities within the Home Office
Robert Jenrick’s resignation as immigration minister on Wednesday was not his first rodeo. For those with a memory for white, middle-class, early-middle-aged men, he was dropped from the cabinet by Boris Johnson in September 2021, having been secretary of state for housing, communities and local government for just over two years. As I am of a similar age to Mr Jenrick, I noted ruefully that he had been sacked from a cabinet position before he had reached his 40th birthday. Talk about precocious.
There was a time when that dismissal would probably have been the end of Jenrick’s front bench career. After all, he was not dropped simply because his face did not fit or there were others with better claims; he was sacked “for cause”, as lawyers say, having been judged to have handled the Grenfell Tower issue badly, unwisely met a party donor at a dinner who was also pursuing business interests in which he had some ministerial involvement and controversially reversed a planning decision made by his predecessor, the late James Brokenshire. In recent years, however, I think beginning with Sir Tony Blair’s premiership, it has been possible for ministers who can swallow their pride to return to government, often at a lower level of seniority than before.
(One of the most striking examples to come to mind is Ann Taylor, Labour MP for Dewsbury, who was lord president of the Council and leader of the House of Commons in Blair’s first cabinet in 1997, moved sideways (at best) to be chief whip from 1998 to 2001, and then recalled in 2007 by Gordon Brown,. by which time she was Baroness Taylor of Bolton, to be an under-secretary of state, the lowest rung of the ladder, at the Ministry of Defence.)
It was therefore no real surprise that Jenrick, a straightforward Cambridge solicitor who could generally get through a media appearance without crying or soiling himself, was recalled to the colours when Liz Truss became prime minister in September 2022, appointed minister of state at the Department for Health and Social Care, two paces behind Truss’s deputy prime minister and health secretary Dr Thérèse Coffey. When Truss gave way to Sunak in October, Jenrick was appointed immigration minister at the Home Office and given the right to attend cabinet (though not full cabinet membership). In July this year, he found himself at the centre of an extraordinary controversy: visiting an asylum reception centre in Kent, he ordered the painting over of wall art intended to be welcoming to children. It was said that he stressed the facility was a “law enforcement environment” and “not a welcome centre”.
Jenrick was seen as an ally of the prime minister, appointed to his position in part to monitor the obviously ambitious and slightly unpredictable home secretary, Suella Braverman. But the immigration portfolio, always one of the most challenging in government, was given additional piquancy given that one of Rishi Sunak’s five promises for 2023 was to “stop small boats”. Jenrick, in short, was responsible for delivering one of five measures on which the head of government would (and will) be judged. Over the past weeks since the Rwanda policy was ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court, it became obvious that Jenrick wanted a robust response to the situation. When he resigned this week, he said in his valedictory missive that he had “such strong disagreements” with the government’s policy and had been trying for “many months” to persuade Sunak, with whom he had been “friends for a long time”, to take a tougher line.
In the immediate wake of his resignation, anonymous Downing Street sources implied that one factor was disappointment at not having been made home secretary when Suella Braverman was dismissed in November. I don’t know if he was ever a serious candidate: he would have seemed a rather lightweight choice, but Rishi Sunak has made some unexpected ministerial choices (Grant Shapps as defence secretary, for example). But switching the more weighty James Cleverly from his post as foreign secretary made a lot of political sense.
Jenrick leaves at a difficult time. Sunak is determined to salvage the deal with Rwanda; on Wednesday, the home secretary travelled to Kigali to sign a new treaty with Rwanda to address some of the concerns in the Supreme Court judgement, and the Home Office introduced the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill, the second prong of the attack which would partially disarm the judicial system from addressing the Rwanda scheme.
Rather than appoint a new immigration minister, which might have resulted in near-unbearable media scrutiny, Sunak has reconfigured ministerial responsibilities at the Home Office. Tom Pursglove, MP for Corby since 2015, becomes minister for legal migration and delivery, while Michael Tomlinson, the solicitor general, assumes the post of minister for illegal migration (presumably he can be read as minister against illegal migration).
(Tomlinson’s position as solicitor general has been taken by the appropriately named Robert Courts, who had been chair of the House of Commons Defence Committee only since October. Only a few weeks ago I analysed the potential priorities for Courts, but the main points stand for his successor.)
Pursglove has a degree of form. From September 2021 to July 2022, he was a minister jointly in the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office responsible for “tackling illegal migration”, and for Liz Truss’s brief premiership he was promoted to minister of state and given overall control of immigration. Pursglove is only 35 and a thoroughgoing political insider, and has been described as “the most right-wing member of the government”. Some suspect that Sunak hopes Pursglove’s appointment is meant as a sign of reassurance to the right and an attempt to win their support for the Rwanda legislation.
Tomlinson is hardly a pinko either: formerly deputy chairman of the European Research Group, he will take direct responsibility for the Rwanda bill, in which role his legal background and 14 months as a law officer will be of some assistance. He will also attend cabinet.
Anoosh Chakelian in The New Statesman has suggested that the immigration brief has been split to emphasise to the voters that legal and illegal migration are two very different phenomena. That would be no bad thing, as the two are consistently and misleadingly conflated. It may also be a reflection of the fact that stewardship of the Safety of Rwanda Bill will be an enormous task (unless, as some rumours suggest, the prime minister lacks the votes to get the bill beyond even its Second Reading in the House of Commons).
It also leaves the Home Office with a heavyweight ministerial team: apart from the home secretary, James Cleverly, there are four ministers of state (security; legal migration and delivery; illegal migration; crime, policing and fire) and two under-secretaries of state (victims and safeguarding; House of Lords). One might reflect that in 2005, the department had three ministers of state and three under-secretaries of state, but was also responsible for prisons, probation and the judicial system. In 1997, at the end of the Conservative government, there had been three ministers of state and two under-secretaries. Ministers these days: they don’t know they’re born.
The administrative arrangements within the Home Office will probably matter little in this (likely) last year of the current government. Whether the Safety of Rwanda Bill passes through Parliament, and in what condition, will be a matter of hard politics; even if it slips through both Houses more smoothly than anticipated, I think it is very unlikely that there will be significant transfer of asylum seekers from the UK to Rwanda. Nor do I think the number of small boats will decline significantly in 2023/24.
The prime minister has chosen difficult terrain for a bitter defensive stand. We are now in a strange and eerie landscape, in which legislation can say than one thing is another, that Rwanda shall be “safe” because words printed on a piece of paper say it is, and in which the government pursues a policy which may not come to pass and which on the most generous interpretation will have only a modest impact on a much larger and more pressing challenge. Yet I sense we have not seen the furthest reaches of the strangeness yet.
Recently, considering what is the most likely outcome of the next 12 months, I thought back to the hoarse, tired swansong of the last long-serving Conservative government (1979-97), and I tried to remember the out-and-out weirdest episode of that long period of decline. There were some real jewels: Scottish Office minister Allan Stewart waving a pickaxe at demonstrators on a construction site in 1995 was a fine example; the resignation of the chairman of the Scottish Conservative Party, Sir Michael Hirst, amid allegations of numerous gay affairs just weeks before polling day in 1997 set a high bar; and I have a great affection for the participation of David Soul, the actor and singer who was Hutch to Paul Michael Glaser’s Starsky, in BBC war reporter’s quixotic and ultimately successful candidacy for Tatton in Cheshire.
I suspect this forthcoming general election will comfortably outdo the Major years.