Home Office chaos looks none too Priti
The perpetual conflict between Eastasia, Oceania and Eurasia’ in Orwell’s 1984 is a warning, not a how-to. Yet Number 10 and Boris Johnson’s government seem to be creating their own version of permanent war, finding enemies real and imagined right across the ranks of the civil service, the backbenches and Britain’s oldest institutions.
The latest extraordinary row broke came to a head this weekend, with Sir Philip Rutnam quitting as permanent secretary at the Home Office and suing the government for constructive dismissal after a vicious briefing war and what Rutnam alleges counts as “bullying” behaviour from the home secretary, Priti Patel, which she denies. Sir Philip is not beyond reproach and, in a sense, it is something of a surprise he was in the top job.
He has been within touching distance of all sorts of government clangers, from the West Coast rail franchising debacle to the shocking treatment of the Windrush generation. In the furore around the latter, two senior officials and the then-home secretary Amber Rudd all received the heave-ho; Rutnam sailed on regardless, and then memorably complained in a Select Committee that it was frightfully rude of MPs not to tell him what they were going to ask in advance.
In the private sector, rather than the pleasantly coddled world of the civil service, he’d have been lucky not to be out on his ear.
Nonetheless, it is another day of the government having to clean up after a self-inflicted wound. We can add it to the appointment of “weirdo” Andrew Sabisky, briefings that the licence fee was for the chop, the departure of a chancellor, the kite-flying of a mansion tax, being too slow to respond to the coronavirus outbreak and the apparent lack of concern shown to flood victims as examples of the government finding itself in possession of a firearm and pointing it squarely towards its feet.
If entrepreneurs’ relief is indeed scrapped in addition to the cancellation of the corporation tax cut, a scrap with the business community seems inevitable too. All the while, Britain is attempting to redraw its immigration system, sign a deal with the world’s largest (and most inflexible) trading bloc, come to a pact with an unpredictable US President and “level up” the UK economy. It’s hard to see how a government that keeps giving itself black eyes will manage it.
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