Westminster thinks that the home secretary will stay, but we've only heard her side of the story
Since Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein did for Richard Nixon, journalists have had a compulsion to designate scandals by adding the postfix "gate". In the case of Arrivalsgate, the murky business of the home secretary and the relaxation of border controls, the handle comes pre-attached for us.
The consensus at Westminster is that Theresa May is going to survive this storm. David Cameron does not want to lose a home secretary so soon after losing a defence secretary and is anyway temperamentally averse to reshuffles. Nor will he willingly sacrifice one of the few women in cabinet when the prime minister is already in trouble with female voters. Until now – so goes the case for Ms May – she had proved a safeish pair of hands in a notoriously tricky department. The number of former Labour home secretaries available for comment has been a form of testimony to the department's traditional role as a cemetery of political careers. Ms May – so continues the reasoning – has given such an emphatic account blaming the fiasco on officials that she would have to be the most reckless liar if her story is not supported by the evidence.
I would say that the consensus is correct that the home secretary is likely to survive. But things are not going to stand still. If it is proved that she has given a misleading account, and traduced long-standing and dedicated public servants in the process, then neither her sex nor her seniority should make a jot of difference to her fate.
So far we have only heard one side of the story – that of the home secretary. According to her, she was horrified to learn that hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals had entered Britain without the verification of biometrics and fingerprints, and without being checked against watchlists of terrorists and criminals. She admits to sanctioning an unannounced trial of "risk-based" inspections of travellers from the European Union. This meant not doing full checks on some passengers, including children travelling with their parents, to allow immigration officials to focus on those more likely to be criminals, terrorists or illegal entrants. She did not, she insists, authorise a wider relaxation of checks on arrivals from farther away. In her version, that was all the fault of Brodie Clark, the former director of border control for the UK Border Agency, upon whom she has dumped very publicly and from a very great height.
Some former home secretaries, echoing a widespread view in the civil service, have described it as disreputable to do that to a senior official when he could not answer back. Well, Mr Clark can now answer back because he has resigned. He is going to sue for constructive dismissal on the grounds that he was so unfairly vilified by the home secretary that his position was rendered impossible. It is a case he looks highly likely to win. We will hear him strongly challenge Ms May's narrative when he gives his account of events before the home affairs select committee. He will contradict the home secretary's assertion that he went much further than she had sanctioned. He will say that he did not, as has been claimed by Ms May and her officials, admit to the chief executive of the UKBA that he had exceeded ministerial instructions. Indeed he is likely to contend that he came under pressure from ministers to reduce queues in arrivals halls. He will argue that he relaxed checks only when the police requested he did so because they feared disorder breaking out among disgruntled mobs of waiting passengers.
So we are going to be faced with a classic problem of the "he said, she said" variety. One way of helping us towards the truth would be for the Home Office to release the paperwork: the minutes of meetings, emails and other communications. Ms May's colleagues insist that there is no "smoking email". The minutes, they say, will support her version of events. If that is the case, it is strange that the Home Office has thus far refused to divulge a single piece of documentation pertaining to this affair. Keith Vaz, chairman of the home affairs select committee, and his colleagues could do the pursuit of truth a favour by demanding that the department releases the paperwork for their scrutiny and ours.
Another way of assessing the claim and counterclaim is to consider the characters of the protagonists. I agree with those who say that civil servants ought to be accountable if they make major blunders, but there has been nothing edifying about the way in which Ms May assigned culpability to officials before they had a chance to put their case. The old codes of ministerial responsibility, already tattered, have been further shredded by her conduct. That does not, however, prove her to be a liar who sacrificed the careers of long-serving officials to save her own skin. She is generally a very cautious personality. It would seem very out of character for Ms May to brazenly mislead parliament, especially when she could so easily be found out.
On the other hand, we have the reputation of Mr Clark, a highly experienced former prison governor who became director of security for all jails. People very familiar with Mr Clark describe him as a most unlikely person willfully to disobey explicit ministerial instructions. "When I first heard his name mentioned, I was amazed," says one former home secretary. "He's a real stickler for form. He's not a chancer, he's an absolutely play-by-the-rules man. He's one of those straight- down-the-line civil servants."
Two other officials have also been suspended with him. Is it the home secretary's case that three of the most senior personnel at the UK Border Agency all went "rogue" at once? That doesn't seem very credible. To cut through the thicket, it is useful to ask a very basic question: why were they relaxing entry controls at Heathrow and elsewhere in the first place? The Tories had spent years in opposition charging Labour with allowing Britain's borders to become dangerously porous. In a speech recentlyjust a month ago, the prime minister declared: "Together we will reclaim our borders and send illegal immigrants home." At the same time, his government is committed to a tough austerity programme and some of the most severe squeezes on public spending are being felt by the Home Office. The cut to the budget of the UK Border Agency is of the order of 25%.
That has left the agency trying to reconcile two conflicting political ambitions. It is supposed to both shed a lot of staff and make Britain's borders stronger. The result was entirely predictable: longer queues at airports and ports, especially at peak times and busy periods of the year.
I've not much doubt that there was agitation from both the police and politicians to manage down the queues, as well as pressure from airport operators and airlines, conscious of the lousy publicity of confronting tourists and business travellers to Britain with lengthy waits in heaving arrivals halls. People familiar with the process suggest that a recommendation which had been put to Home Office ministers would have been to waive all checks on passengers with EU passports in order to concentrate on travellers from elsewhere.
That would not have been politically palatable to Ms May because of the likely reaction from her Eurosceptic party.
Some of the things done were a reasonable attempt to finesse this tension between rising demands and contracting staff. It actually made sense to pilot schemes which allowed looser checks on lower-risk passengers in order to concentrate on more rigorous probing of travellers more likely to be a potential threat. Crude profiling is both inflammatory and hazardous in itself. It would be handy for the authorities if every terrorist was a ringer for Osama bin Laden, but they are not. Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber" who attempted to blow up a transatlantic flight, was born a British citizen in south London.
What does make sense is for immigration officials to spend less time checking the passport of, say, a veteran of the Normandy landings returning from an Armistice Day commemoration in France and put more scrutiny on a young man who has made 10 trips to Pakistan in the past year and has a tendency to disappear for months at a time.
One potential and regrettable casualty of the media frenzy may be the abandonment of attempts to take a more intelligent, risk-based approach. The result will be the worst of both worlds: longer queues for the entirely innocent passenger and poorer protection against those who are not.
Even with more sophisticated deployment of resources, the border agency will still be left stretched trying to square the circle between the conflicting demands of its political masters. It will be far from alone in facing a dilemma which confronts many agencies and arms of government. Whatever the eventual fate of Ms May, she has already illuminated the future.
This will be far from the last case of its kind as civil servants try to reconcile tight money with the extravagant promises made by their political masters and mistresses.
At least they have now been forewarned that cowardly politicians will attempt to blame them when it proves to be impossible.
The consensus at Westminster is that Theresa May is going to survive this storm. David Cameron does not want to lose a home secretary so soon after losing a defence secretary and is anyway temperamentally averse to reshuffles. Nor will he willingly sacrifice one of the few women in cabinet when the prime minister is already in trouble with female voters. Until now – so goes the case for Ms May – she had proved a safeish pair of hands in a notoriously tricky department. The number of former Labour home secretaries available for comment has been a form of testimony to the department's traditional role as a cemetery of political careers. Ms May – so continues the reasoning – has given such an emphatic account blaming the fiasco on officials that she would have to be the most reckless liar if her story is not supported by the evidence.
I would say that the consensus is correct that the home secretary is likely to survive. But things are not going to stand still. If it is proved that she has given a misleading account, and traduced long-standing and dedicated public servants in the process, then neither her sex nor her seniority should make a jot of difference to her fate.
So far we have only heard one side of the story – that of the home secretary. According to her, she was horrified to learn that hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals had entered Britain without the verification of biometrics and fingerprints, and without being checked against watchlists of terrorists and criminals. She admits to sanctioning an unannounced trial of "risk-based" inspections of travellers from the European Union. This meant not doing full checks on some passengers, including children travelling with their parents, to allow immigration officials to focus on those more likely to be criminals, terrorists or illegal entrants. She did not, she insists, authorise a wider relaxation of checks on arrivals from farther away. In her version, that was all the fault of Brodie Clark, the former director of border control for the UK Border Agency, upon whom she has dumped very publicly and from a very great height.
Some former home secretaries, echoing a widespread view in the civil service, have described it as disreputable to do that to a senior official when he could not answer back. Well, Mr Clark can now answer back because he has resigned. He is going to sue for constructive dismissal on the grounds that he was so unfairly vilified by the home secretary that his position was rendered impossible. It is a case he looks highly likely to win. We will hear him strongly challenge Ms May's narrative when he gives his account of events before the home affairs select committee. He will contradict the home secretary's assertion that he went much further than she had sanctioned. He will say that he did not, as has been claimed by Ms May and her officials, admit to the chief executive of the UKBA that he had exceeded ministerial instructions. Indeed he is likely to contend that he came under pressure from ministers to reduce queues in arrivals halls. He will argue that he relaxed checks only when the police requested he did so because they feared disorder breaking out among disgruntled mobs of waiting passengers.
So we are going to be faced with a classic problem of the "he said, she said" variety. One way of helping us towards the truth would be for the Home Office to release the paperwork: the minutes of meetings, emails and other communications. Ms May's colleagues insist that there is no "smoking email". The minutes, they say, will support her version of events. If that is the case, it is strange that the Home Office has thus far refused to divulge a single piece of documentation pertaining to this affair. Keith Vaz, chairman of the home affairs select committee, and his colleagues could do the pursuit of truth a favour by demanding that the department releases the paperwork for their scrutiny and ours.
Another way of assessing the claim and counterclaim is to consider the characters of the protagonists. I agree with those who say that civil servants ought to be accountable if they make major blunders, but there has been nothing edifying about the way in which Ms May assigned culpability to officials before they had a chance to put their case. The old codes of ministerial responsibility, already tattered, have been further shredded by her conduct. That does not, however, prove her to be a liar who sacrificed the careers of long-serving officials to save her own skin. She is generally a very cautious personality. It would seem very out of character for Ms May to brazenly mislead parliament, especially when she could so easily be found out.
On the other hand, we have the reputation of Mr Clark, a highly experienced former prison governor who became director of security for all jails. People very familiar with Mr Clark describe him as a most unlikely person willfully to disobey explicit ministerial instructions. "When I first heard his name mentioned, I was amazed," says one former home secretary. "He's a real stickler for form. He's not a chancer, he's an absolutely play-by-the-rules man. He's one of those straight- down-the-line civil servants."
Two other officials have also been suspended with him. Is it the home secretary's case that three of the most senior personnel at the UK Border Agency all went "rogue" at once? That doesn't seem very credible. To cut through the thicket, it is useful to ask a very basic question: why were they relaxing entry controls at Heathrow and elsewhere in the first place? The Tories had spent years in opposition charging Labour with allowing Britain's borders to become dangerously porous. In a speech recentlyjust a month ago, the prime minister declared: "Together we will reclaim our borders and send illegal immigrants home." At the same time, his government is committed to a tough austerity programme and some of the most severe squeezes on public spending are being felt by the Home Office. The cut to the budget of the UK Border Agency is of the order of 25%.
That has left the agency trying to reconcile two conflicting political ambitions. It is supposed to both shed a lot of staff and make Britain's borders stronger. The result was entirely predictable: longer queues at airports and ports, especially at peak times and busy periods of the year.
I've not much doubt that there was agitation from both the police and politicians to manage down the queues, as well as pressure from airport operators and airlines, conscious of the lousy publicity of confronting tourists and business travellers to Britain with lengthy waits in heaving arrivals halls. People familiar with the process suggest that a recommendation which had been put to Home Office ministers would have been to waive all checks on passengers with EU passports in order to concentrate on travellers from elsewhere.
That would not have been politically palatable to Ms May because of the likely reaction from her Eurosceptic party.
Some of the things done were a reasonable attempt to finesse this tension between rising demands and contracting staff. It actually made sense to pilot schemes which allowed looser checks on lower-risk passengers in order to concentrate on more rigorous probing of travellers more likely to be a potential threat. Crude profiling is both inflammatory and hazardous in itself. It would be handy for the authorities if every terrorist was a ringer for Osama bin Laden, but they are not. Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber" who attempted to blow up a transatlantic flight, was born a British citizen in south London.
What does make sense is for immigration officials to spend less time checking the passport of, say, a veteran of the Normandy landings returning from an Armistice Day commemoration in France and put more scrutiny on a young man who has made 10 trips to Pakistan in the past year and has a tendency to disappear for months at a time.
One potential and regrettable casualty of the media frenzy may be the abandonment of attempts to take a more intelligent, risk-based approach. The result will be the worst of both worlds: longer queues for the entirely innocent passenger and poorer protection against those who are not.
Even with more sophisticated deployment of resources, the border agency will still be left stretched trying to square the circle between the conflicting demands of its political masters. It will be far from alone in facing a dilemma which confronts many agencies and arms of government. Whatever the eventual fate of Ms May, she has already illuminated the future.
This will be far from the last case of its kind as civil servants try to reconcile tight money with the extravagant promises made by their political masters and mistresses.
At least they have now been forewarned that cowardly politicians will attempt to blame them when it proves to be impossible.
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