Analysis: Amber Rudd thought she was a frontrunner to be the next prime minister – now she's fighting for her job

In the past two decades, the office of Home Secretary has become known as the place where Cabinet careers go to die. Charles Clarke and Jacqui Smith can both attest to the damage immigration and crime scandals can do to a career.

While the previous home secretary, Theresa May, became the longest serving resident of the Home Office in modern times, her successor, Amber Rudd, finds herself embattled. She has rolled straight on from a violent crime debacle to an immigration scandal in less than ten days, and as a prominent Cabinet Remainer she is now under considerable pressure.

The woman whom some had pegged as the natural successor to Theresa May now finds herself facing questions of how long she can survive in the job. So how did she get here?

Taking the blame on violent crime

Just over a week ago, Ms Rudd was preparing for a day in the limelight with her first big policy announcement as home secretary. The Serious Violence Strategy was to be launched amid a surge in stabbings and murders in London and rising violent crime figures nationwide and was seen an opportunity for the Conservatives to restore their law and order lustre.

But while the report might have been seen as a touch underwhelming and its funding, at £40m, a little paltry, the launch was a disaster.

The report itself, despite being 112-pages long, made no mention of police resources or that there were now 20,000 fewer officers than in 2010. Meanwhile, Ms Rudd had written an opinion piece in The Sunday Telegraph denying a link between police cuts and rising crime.

Unfortunately for the Home Secretary, a report from her own department had been leaked which said that a lack of police resources “likely contributed” to the rise in violent crime. Under pressure, Ms Rudd then denied even having seen the report.

Now, one scandal does not a career-ending debacle make, particularly when the policy in question has been backed by the Prime Minister for nearly a decade. The Home Secretary could easily have retreated quietly into 2 Marsham Street to lick her wounds. Except, this Monday turned out to be even worse than the last.

Feeling the Windrush

The issue of the Home Office’s treatment of Windrush generation migrants has been rumbling along quietly for several months. But this week is the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting – the first to be held in Britain since 1997.

With dozens of world leaders in town, many have been angling for five minutes with the Prime Minister. 13 Caribbean leaders asked to meet with Mrs May to discuss the plight of the Windrush migrants but were rebuffed by Number 10. That move sparked outrage, pushing the issue front and centre and generating rather a lot of difficult questions for Ms Rudd and her immigration minister, Caroline Nokes.

How many people were affected? Was anyone deported by mistake? If so, how many? That neither politician seemed to be able to answer the question only made things worse. Ms Rudd then turned on her department. While apologising, she said the Home Office had “lost sight of individuals” and become “too concerned with policy”.

As with the police cuts, the “hostile environment” plan which caused these problems for Windrush migrants was devised by Mrs May. Unlike with the police cuts, this fiasco needn’t have descended into a broader challenge to the Tories’s governance and could have been nipped in the bud if it had been resolved early on. The number of people affected by this is relatively small; the Home Office says it knows of 49 cases.

The Brexit factor

A skilled and popular politician can still survive a raging political storm. Michael Gove’s recent comeback is proof of that. But the foundations upon which Ms Rudd has built her career no longer look as strong as they once did.

The Home Secretary was a very prominent member of the Remain campaign and was criticised for the personal nature of her attacks on Boris Johnson. Promoted within the Cabinet after Mrs May took over, she is now responsible for one of the most sensitive areas of post-Brexit policy, in the form of immigration, a subject on which she remains at odds with the Prime Minister.

Leave supporters inside and outside the party are rumoured to be targeting her, and already unflattering opinion pieces have made their way into the tabloids. That it was her department that chose not follow the French example and bend the rules to ensure passports were British made only added to the low regard in which some Brexiteers hold her.

Ms Rudd is believed to hold serious leadership ambitions. Earlier this month she was revealed to have held a £2,000 a head fundraising dinner, and she has reportedly been putting the leg work in with other MPs. However, she also sits on a much-reduced majority of just 364 votes in her Hastings constituency. There had been suggestions that room could be made for Ms Rudd in a safer seat – for example by the septuagenarian Sir Nicholas Soames in nearby Mid Sussex. Right now that looks less likely than ever.