Front Bench: Theresa May can't shake the Windrush scandal because it's all about her personal stance on immigration

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Front Bench

After a torrid week, the Government is trying to shift things onto a positive note. Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary, has announced a ban on plastic straws and plastic stemmed cotton buds. There will be a consultation this summer, before legislation which should happen next year.

Theresa May will use the policy as part of her centrepiece announcement to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting today. The summit has been going all week, but the next two days are the main event. May will announce the policy and push her fellow Commonwealth leaders to take similar measures at Buckingham Palace, where 47 Commonwealth heads of government and state are having lunch with the Queen.

Enter Boris

Never keen to be out of the spotlight for long, the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, has given The Telegraph an interview. In it he discusses tackling knife crime, being relaxed on immigration, the importance of diverging from the EU and restoring the prominence of the Commonwealth.

Why is the Foreign Secretary discussing domestic knife crime and immigration during a major international summit? Johnson has made himself rather unpopular before by roaming around onto other minister’s patches, and stop and search is particularly sensitive.

Reducing its use was a key policy of Theresa May’s when she was home secretary – a celebrated one which the PM believes averted a national scandal – and she has reportedly clashed vociferously with Johnson on the policy as recently as last month. In the Telegraph interview Johnson sticks to targeting Sadiq Khan and appears to talk about mayoral, not Home Office powers. Whether the PM accepts that explanation remains to be seen.

Windrush under control? No chance

The focus on Khan may have been intended to helpfully move attention away from the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, whose job looked under threat yesterday from the Windrush scandal. If so, it hasn’t worked. The Guardian and the Daily Mail both carry Windrush on their front pages, and the story hasn’t got any better for the Government overnight.

The PM may have thought she was finally on the front foot after stumping Jeremy Corbyn in PMQs by declaring that the decision to destroy Windrush landing cards had been taken in 2009, under Labour.

Two developments have put paid to that impression.

The Head of the Home Civil Service at the time of May’s “hostile environment” policy towards illegal immigrants went on Newsnight to claim that across government her policy had been “highly contested” and that some ministers believed it was “almost reminiscent of Nazi Germany”. Meanwhile, the Mail has uncovered a Home Office internal assessment from 2014 that warned of exactly such an outcome as the Windrush scandal.

Isn’t there a summit on?

As the fiasco rumbles on – and completely overshadows the Commonwealth summit – the obvious question to ask is how damaging this is for the Government. But four years out from a general election, it’s probably worth paying more attention to what it says about May.

Defenders of the PM were pointing out yesterday that her “hostile environment” policy was the result of needing to meet a completely unachievable immigration target imposed by David Cameron. Yet Cameron is gone and Johnson, the Archbishop of Brexit, has repeatedly offered the PM a way out on immigration by arguing that Brexit is not about slamming shut the gates. But May won't budge. Britain’s elites have been shown to be thoroughly out of touch with ordinary voters when it comes to immigration, and it shouldn’t be forgotten that the “hostile environment” was targeted at illegal immigrants.

Electorally, May may well be absolutely right to stick to her guns on this, after all she won the same percentage of votes in 2017 as Margaret Thatcher did in her 1983 landslide. But whichever way this goes, the credit or blame will likely be May's alone to take.

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