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The real case for Priti Patel is that he is politically indispensable to the Conservative Party, at least in its current form. She combines a number of vital qualities when it comes to Boris Johnson’s Downing Street: She is an impeccable Brexiteer, an authoritarian committed to law and order, a devoted immigration restrictionist, and hails from both an ethnic minority and a common background. .
No one else in the parliamentary party meets all of these requirements in the same way. The only other minister who comes close to doing so is James Cleverly, although he has a private education and has never held the full rank of the cabinet. All the other candidates fall short in one way or another: a little too fancy, too liberal when it comes to crime or immigration, etc. In my opinion, there is nothing significant about Patel buying the Conservative Party that Cleverly wouldn’t, but that doesn’t ‘Never mind: that’s not Downing Street’s opinion, and the prime minister has decided to do everything in his power. power to keep it.
That reality frees us from having to seriously engage with any of the explicit arguments being made for her retention as secretary of state, although the issue is worth briefly explaining with them.
We have the line of “I’ve never found it more than polite” that some conservative MPs are taking. Responding to an accusation of bullying behavior towards subordinates by saying that the person in question has never been unpleasant to you, a colleague, is like responding to someone who says they are allergic to nuts by saying that you saw him eat a whole carrot yesterday: you can be true, but not relevant at all.
We also have the assertion that “strict management is necessary to fulfill the government’s agenda.” The pre-Patel Home Office delivered the hostile environment policy, the detention of young children and a points-based immigration system for newcomers outside of Europe. It is simply ridiculous to claim that the department needs to be pushed or pushed to fulfill the government’s agenda. (Also, if true, I would suggest that MPs moving along these lines believe that the other 20 cabinet ministers, who have not been the subject of a Cabinet Office investigation, are not complying with their reports – an important statement that any MP should do. about his own party!)
Obviously, there is a problem with the response capacity of the Ministry of the Interior to political leadership; Not only does the published summary of the report on Patel’s behavior acknowledge this, but the fact that Windrush’s compensation scheme remains Byzantine, difficult to access, and slow is in vogue. itself an example of that. But it is difficult, frankly, to state that the problem of the lack of response from the Ministry of the Interior results in increased liberalism.
[See also: The slow, inaccessible Windrush compensation scheme is a moral failure]
Then we have the argument that keeping Priti Patel in office is fine, because the report states that his harassment was “unintentional.” I take an old-fashioned view here, which is that if you can’t operate in a high-pressure environment without inadvertently intimidating your staff, you probably shouldn’t be in charge of the UK’s counter-terrorism response.
The true story of this report appears to be a department that has internal difficulties and poor leadership on its political side. However, there is no apparent plan by Downing Street to change any of these things.
And that’s why your decision to put Patel’s political courage before this report may go back to No. 10, because misbehavior in the workplace is not simply a moral or human resource issue. It is also the product of incompetence and operational inability: in a department where such things have significant and, in some cases, deadly consequences, there can also be serious political consequences.
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