The graveyard of careers?
Home Secretary is regarded as one of the great offices of state, yet also has a reputation for destroying ministerial careers
Anyone expecting Rishi Sunak to make minor changes to the existing government and pursue stability and continuity will have found today surprising and enough to make the head spin. The new prime minister has removed 11 ministers attending cabinet, clearing out a lot of Liz Truss’s loyal supporters, and recast his top team in dramatic fashion. Headlines have included the return of Dominic Raab as deputy prime minister and justice secretary and Michael Gove’s revival as levelling-up secretary. However, Sunak also caught attention by reinstating Suella Braverman as home secretary, the first politician to hold the office twice since Labour’s Roy Jenkins (1965-67 and 1974-76).
The Home Office is an old department. In 1660, the office of secretary of state was divided into two discrete parts, the Northern Department and the Southern Department. These institutions shared out the business of government on a partly geographical basis—for example, the Northern Department was responsible for relations with the Holy Roman Empire, Russia and Scandinavia, while the Southern Department looked after France, Spain and the Ottoman Empire—an arrangement which seems odd to modern eyes but must be seen in the context of the development of bureaucracy. This arrangement was regarded as satisfactory, though it was augmented by an occasional secretary of state for Scotland and, after 1768, a secretary of state for the colonies.
In 1782, the responsibilities were reorganised and assigned on a basis which seems to us more logical. The Southern Department became the Home Office, while the Northern Department became the Foreign Office, organisations which exist in some form to this day. The Home Office, the senior of the two posts, took over all domestic policy areas, which centred largely on relations with the crown, such as the exercise of the Royal Prerogative and petitions and addresses to the sovereign, and on the maintenance of law and order. Gradually, as the scope of central government expanded, particular issues were hived off to dedicated departments like the War Office and the Local Government Board. But the evolution of the Home Office meant that, inevitably, it was left with odds and sods in a catch-all portfolio.
Until 1936, for example, the home secretary was required to attend royal births, to ensure that the babies were genuinely royal and there had been no substitutions (echoes of the Warming Pan Scandal of 1688). The last birth to be witnessed by a home secretary was that of Princess Alexandra, which was attended by Sir John Simon. By the time the current King was born in 1948, it was regarded as unnecessary and perhaps inappropriate for a senior politician to be so closely involved in such a delicate matter.
While responsibilities continued to be shed by the Home Office, it retained the core functions of law and order, prisons, borders and immigration, as well as matters touching on the crown. Politicians continued to aspire to be home secretary, not just because it was a “great office of state” and the senior secretaryship of state but also because it entailed responsibility for issues which mattered greatly to the public. Crime and punishment are always high on the list of voters’ priorities, and the opportunity to influence those areas was attractive. There has also always been a certain secretive glamour in the home secretary’s oversight of MI5, the Security Service, which was created in 1909 to counter subversion and espionage within the United Kingdom. (It is hard to credit now, when the director-general of MI5 gives media interviews and millions are glued to the BBC to watch Spooks, but the government did not even admit to the organisation’s existence until the Security Service Act 1989.)
The danger of being home secretary lay, as it still lies, in being responsible for a number of policy areas which are essentially reactive. Some incumbents have attempted to introduce long-term measures but much more often they are left dealing with rising crime levels, failures in the prison service or inadequate and underfunded policing. A high-profile prisoner escape, a terrorist outrage, a new crime wave: all of these land at the home secretary’s door and cannot always be predicted.
Partly as a result, the Home Office has sometimes been seen as a hardship posting among the senior members of government: Rab Butler was rather disappointed to be made home secretary after four years as chancellor and a spell as leader of the House of Commons, but Macmillan needed to find a senior position for his leadership rival and was not willing to give him the job of foreign secretary which he desired. Equally, Reginald Maudling, made home secretary by Edward Heath in 1970, had not anticipated the appointment. In opposition he had shadowed foreign affairs and defence (as well as taking a clutch of City directorships), and the shadow home secretary had been the boisterous and volatile but brilliant Quintin Hogg, formerly Lord Hailsham. When Heath formed his cabinet, however, he sent Hogg back to the House of Lords to be lord chancellor, and recalled the former prime minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home to be foreign secretary, so the only chair left for Maudling when the music stopped was the Home Office.
Some politicians, however, have seen opportunities rather than hazards in being home secretary. Roy Jenkins was offered the position by Harold Wilson in 1965, and accepted enthusiastically. He was the youngest home secretary since Winston Churchill in 1911 and had a clear agenda for reform, shaking up the institution itself and introducing many measures which became known as the “Progressive Society”: he cut the number of police forces, increased restrictions on the the ownership of firearms, expanded the use of bail and early release for prisoners and supported legislation to legalise abortion and homosexuality.
At the other end of the political spectrum, Michael Howard seized the position of home secretary when John Major shuffled his cabinet in 1993. Firmly on the right of the Conservative Party, Howard, a clever and slick but not easily likeable Welsh barrister, believed in tough law and order measures and summed up his approach with the phrase “Prison works”. He saw the prison population almost double, reduced defendants’ right to silence and increased tariffs for certain offences, relishing the ensuing public battles with the judiciary and presenting himself as the representative of the ordinary voter against the liberal establishment. It made him the darling of the Tory right, though not enough to propel him to the party leadership when Major resigned in 1997 (he had planned to run on a joint ticket with the young William Hague, until the latter pulled out of the arrangement and won the leadership for himself).
The diverse agglomeration of responsibilities of the home secretary continued to hold pitfalls. David Blunkett had been enthusiastic about taking the job in 2001, but had almost immediately been confronted with the September 11 terrorist attacks and had to bring in new and strict anti-terrorism legislation which angered Labour backbenchers and was opposed by the House of Lords. He, like Howard, relished confrontation with the judiciary and civil liberties campaigners. In 2004, however, it was revealed that he had fast-tracked a visa for the nanny of his former lover, Kimberley Quinn. It was, in the global perspective, a minor matter, but for the home secretary it was a clear abuse of his office, and he was forced to resign.
Blunkett’s successor, Charles Clarke, was brought low by the system. The administrative engine of the Home Office had long been regarded as inefficient and unsatisfactory, and in April 2006 it came to light that more than 1,000 foreign offenders had been released without being considered for deportation. Those freed included five who had committed sexual offences against children and two guilty of manslaughter. Clarke fought for his position, pointing out (rightly) that many of the offenders had been freed before he had taken office, but when it transpired that the problem had been brought to the Home Office’s attention but had not been addressed, his place was untenable. In May 2006, Tony Blair offered him a job swap with John Reid, the defence secretary, but Clarke preferred to leave government altogether.
There was by this stage widespread agreement that the Home Office was dysfunctional, collecting together too many disparate policy areas and operating poor management. Reid recognised this early on in his tenure, and described the organisation as “not fit for purpose”, adding to the political lexicon a phrase which would become wearily familiar. Changes needed to be made, and Tony Blair, always enthusiastic for machinery of government changes in broad brush terms but indifferent to the hard detail, was happy to oblige. In March 2007, the government announced that the relatively new Department for Constitutional Affairs (created from the Lord Chancellor’s Department in 2003) would assume responsibility for probation, prisons and reoffending, and be renamed as the Ministry of Justice.
It was intended that a slimmed-down Home Office would be able to concentrate on the activities of a kind of “interior ministry”, overseeing policing, immigration, borders and counter-terrorism, taking that last responsibility from the Cabinet Office. Reid promised that his recast department would look “towards the challenges of today's world, and focus on the priorities of today's people.” But he was did not find universal support. The Conservative opposition countered that the changes would “compound” existing problems, shadow home secretary David Davis arguing that “Breaking it up will solve none of the Home Office's problems. It will just create a whole new raft of problems.” Charles Clarke, Reid’s predecessor, called the plan an “irresponsible decision [which] further delays the reforms which are critically necessary throughout the criminal justice system.”
The intervening 15 years have proved Davis and Clarke more prescient than Reid, as the Home Office has continued to be bedevilled by problems. Amber Rudd, appointed home secretary under Theresa May, lasted barely a year. The department had been engaged in a process of deporting a number of Afro-Caribbean Britons who had come to the UK as part of the “Windrush generation” or had been born here as their descendants. Many were wrongly being treated as illegal immigrants, and there was a policy within the Home Office of creating a “hostile environment” which would encourage them to leave without being deported. Appearing in front of the House of Commons home affairs committee, Rudd denied that there were targets for deportation, and responded angrily that “that’s not how we operate”. She was perfectly in earnest, but poorly briefed. It eventually emerged that targets had indeed existed, though she had not been aware of them. Having misled the committee, albeit inadvertently, Rudd chose the honourable course and resigned in April 2018.
We now find ourselves, exactly as David Davis predicted, with two dysfunctional departments rather than one. The Ministry of Justice is struggling with an enormous backlog in the court system, a prison service which, attempting to operate an out-of-date and overcrowded estate, is seeing morale plummet, safety compromised and many prisoners confined to their cells for 23 hours a day. Meanwhile the Home Office is wrestling with immigration policy which seeks both to reduce the number of migrant arrivals and attract qualified people for high-skilled jobs, as well as tackling a police force which is failing to investigate a number of everyday crimes and, most unforgiveably of all, has allowed a situation to develop in which only 1% of rapes are recorded by the police and 63% of cases do not complete prosecution because the victim withdraws from the process.
It is easy—too easy—to suppose that machinery of government changes will provide a magic bullet to these problems. It seems impossible to deny that there are systemic problems within the Home Office, as there have been mistakes and failures of bureaucracy for more than two decades. UK Visas and Immigration, the current agency responsible for border security, has made repeated mistakes. Migrants are left unable to work or travel because of delays in issuing visas, a streaming tool was found to be based on a faulty algorithm which delivered judgements which were fundamentally racist and the acceptance of refugees from the conflict in Ukraine proceeded with unacceptable slowness because of administrative problems.
We are left with several substantial and complex policy areas which must somehow be parcelled out: policing, counter-terrorism, prisons and probation, courts, immigration and border security. The way that responsibilities are assigned can have a considerable effect on the attitude exhibited towards them. For example, by treating immigration as essentially a matter of border security, it will always be seen as restrictive rather than permissive. Some have suggested that the issue should instead be transferred to the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, an organisation more suited to approach immigration with a sense of what the UK requires in terms of skills and demographics. I suggested in City AM earlier this year that the Home Office concentrated too narrowly on preventing illegal migration rather than the overall picture of attracting talent.
Policing and counter-terrorism are clearly closely related. However, it has been argued recently that they are not inextricably linked: to take one example, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police is responsible not only for ordinary policing in the capital but also for taking a national lead on counter-terrorism. When Dame Cressida Dick resigned after a serious of misjudgements and mistakes in February this year, part of the argument about who should replace her was the suggestion that the job could not comfortably balance both responsibilities. However, when Sir Mark Rowley was appointed as the new commissioner in July, there had been no change. My view is that the establishment of a separate police lead on counter-terrorism is a no-brainer. A dedicated post would allow the appointment of a candidate with deep specialism and experience, freed from the task of overseeing local policing and community relations.
If John Reid’s intention was to create a Home Office narrowly focused on security and policing, it has failed. The department remains ineffective and accident-prone, and within its structure there are uncomfortable overlaps between general law and order and counter-terrorism. For a time the Home Office contained a strong centre in the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, run by the dynamic, ambitious but chronically secretive spook Charles Farr. But it turned out to be more of a personal fiefdom than an institutional cross-departmental body, and seemed to encompass too much, from the government’s counter-terrorism strategy CONTEST through infrastructure resilience to the protection of public figures within the UK.
I have no simple answers. Identifying a problem is always easier than prescribing a solution. The department to which Suella Braverman has returned after her six-day absence is clearly still a great office of state, as it is responsible for not only the maintenance of law and order but the very fundamentals of national security. The home secretary’s own priorities are an added complication: she has spoken enthusiastically about withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights, and has committed herself to the policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. These are issues which speak profoundly to a section of the Conservative Party and are held by some to have populist appeal, but they are peripheral to the central responsibilities of the Home Office, even in its present form.
All of this must be seen through the prism of a government which has not more than 26 months until a general election, and probably considerably less. There may be little appetite for machinery of government changes, and Home Office legislation has a tendency to take many months to make its way through both houses of Parliament. Braverman may, therefore, be disinclined to look at the fundamental organisation of her department and its sibling the MoJ: but until the way these various responsibilities are allotted and accreted is examined and—likely—revised, the government will struggle adequately to implement policies which deal with subjects very high on the list of the electorate’s priorities.