Amid all the fanfare surrounding Boris Johnson’s first few days in office, news that Priti Patel was being promoted from the backbenches to the role of home secretary caused perhaps the greatest stir in Whitehall.
A committed Thatcherite and free marketeer, not only is Ms Patel notoriously hardline on criminal justice issues — having famously declared her support for the death penalty, before eventually backtracking — but she was forced to resign from the cabinet less than two years ago over a scandal involving unauthorised talks with the Israeli government.
Yet the ardent Brexiter and Johnson loyalist — since dubbed the “Lazarus of politics” — has returned in earnest to become the most senior woman in the Cabinet, heading one of the four great offices of state.
Given the prime minister’s commitment to deliver Brexit by October 31, Ms Patel will have the crucial job of reshaping the immigration system when free movement ends and bringing back the “control” over incoming migrants that Leave voters were promised.
Home Office officials are already braced for a more interventionist home secretary than either Sajid Javid or Amber Rudd has been. Ms Patel’s voting record shows strong support for a stricter asylum system, tough enforcement of immigration rules and restricting legal aid, while being opposed to same-sex marriage and retaining EU human rights principles after Brexit.
In an interview with the Daily Mail this weekend, she said she hoped to make potential offenders “literally feel terror” when contemplating criminality. Mr Johnson’s administration is expected to focus relentlessly on cutting crime and reducing immigration in response to polls showing this is what matters most to voters.
However, her allies argue that she will be committed to delivery rather than being driven by ideology.
“Priti is a politician who’s always been focused on the bottom line: does this policy deliver for people?” one aide said. “She’s not going to be making announcements for the sake of it, you’ll need to judge her on outcomes rather than preconceptions. She’ll be pragmatic in her outlook and we’ll be running a very open house.”
The immediate task is recruiting 20,000 extra police officers in an attempt to stem an epidemic in knife crime and compensate for previous cuts. Longer-term, Ms Patel will begin the much harder job of reforming the immigration system.
Sunder Katwala, director of the British Future think-tank, predicts she will be welcoming to high-skilled, high-paid immigrants and international students, but bear down on low and middle-skilled migrants.
“What’s interesting is that for a very, very pro-business politician, she’s more sceptical about business claims on immigration than any other area of the system,” he says.
Just days after her appointment, Ms Patel wrote a piece for the Mail on Sunday warning employers against “automatically relying on low-skilled labour from abroad” and stating that in future, British businesses “will have to back our people” by investing in training and technology to increase domestic skill levels.
For many employers — who are concerned about filling skills gaps in construction, hospitality and social care after Brexit — this sounds a warning note. Jasmine Whitbread, head of the business lobby London First, said: “Of course we need access to brilliant scientists and academics, but we also need the best migrants from every level, including engineers, nurses and chefs.”
Ms Whitbread’s concern is that typically these roles are paid less than the £30,000 currently set as the minimum salary threshold for skilled workers from outside Europe. “It’s important that these professions are not inadvertently ruled out,” she said.
Ms Patel’s own parents, Ugandan Asians, moved to Britain in the 1960s and established a chain of newsagents around south-east England. She spent her 20s working for the Conservative party, with a brief spell at the Eurosceptic Referendum party, then moved into corporate public relations, lobbying for tobacco and alcohol companies. She was elected an MP for Witham, Essex, in 2010.
As a new MP she came to prominence accompanying David Cameron on state visits to India, and was quickly appointed to a junior Treasury post before landing at the Department for Work and Pensions, where she campaigned as a leading member of Vote Leave in the 2016 EU referendum. Theresa May promoted the Brexiter to her first cabinet post, at the Department for International Development, the following year.
Ms Patel, now 47, is personable and warm but her approachable manner belies an often uncompromising politics. She was one of the authors of Britannia Unchained, a radical Tory pamphlet published in 2012 that prescribed shock therapy to correct what it saw as a nation beset by a workforce of “idlers”, a bloated welfare state and timid approach to entrepreneurship.
At DfiD, the former lobbyist discharged her duties with donors, charities and officials while maintaining a fundamental scepticism about international aid. Even while in post, Ms Patel argued that UK money was being “stolen” and “wasted on inappropriate projects”.
This perspective was “instinctive, not intellectual,” one senior figure in the aid industry said. “It was more of an ideological belief that spending money overseas was somehow unpatriotic.”
Her leadership of DfiD ended abruptly when she was caught making a secret trip to Israel in which she held 12 meetings, including one with prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, without the knowledge of either Downing Street or the Foreign Office.
A former colleague who worked with her at the DWP said they had not been surprised by the scandal because, while she excelled at public-facing elements of the job, she struggled with process — frequently holding meetings without officials present and professing not to trust civil servants.
Ms Patel’s appointment to the Home Office has prompted an outcry from human rights groups concerned about her regressive stance on social issues and support for the department’s controversial hostile environment policies on immigration.
But her allies argue that, as the daughter of migrants, Ms Patel is well-placed to make the case for a balanced border policy that recognises the benefits of immigration while discriminating about who is allowed in. The prime minister’s relative liberalism on immigration may also temper some of Ms Patel’s harsher instincts.
One Whitehall official predicted that the home secretary would capitulate willingly to the instructions of her new boss. “This is a secretary of state who is going to be focused on getting Boris what he wants,” the official said. “Whether that’s more police or an amnesty on asylum seekers, she’ll make it happen.”
