Was this Priti Patel’s finest hour?

The home secretary showed guts in discussing her personal experience with racism, writes Sean O'Grady

The home secretary addresses the Commons this week (AFP/Getty)

The politics of Priti Patel are pretty plain: take a hard line on immigration, law and order, and welfare and the rest takes care of itself. It doesn’t always work out though, and her first year at the Home Office has been turbulent.

So it is just as well for the home secretary that she had a good day in the House of Commons when she made her statement on the recent demonstrations and outbreaks of violence – and in an unexpected way.

First, as usual, she reinforced her hard-line “law and order” credentials. Doubling down on her tweet pledging that “justice will follow”, she made it clear that those who attacked the police and vandalised monuments will face the full force of the law.

Sources say she has “read the riot act” to the chief constable of Avon and Somerset, Andy Marsh, who decided not to forcibly prevent the attack on the statue of Edward Colston.

She doesn’t accept Marsh’s argument that a “very violent confrontation” would follow.

Patel’s fundamentalist approach to civic order and damage to property will have built her some valuable political capital among backbench Conservatives and the grass roots membership. The Tory press will also applaud her.

Although she has reportedly been cleared in an internal inquiry into long-running and unpleasant bullying claims, she still faces an employment tribunal – in effect a public trial – to deal with allegations brought by her former chief civil servant, Philip Rutnam.

Patel is also supposedly on poor terms with the prime minister’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, albeit something that can cut both ways given his own unpopularity in the party. There are ugly rumours about her fate in a post-Covid reshuffle.

So she needs to shore up her position, and the protests have given her the opportunity. Her argument that lawless behaviour undermines the moral force of the Black Lives Matter movement echoes that made by Boris Johnson in his latest video.

Polling suggests public support for this approach. While most people back removing that memorial to a slave trader, only 13 per cent approve of the way it was torn down. Some sense of that, and respect for democracy and the law, would also seem to lie behind the decision taken by Keir Starmer not to condone the destruction of the Colston statue.

But it was when Patel chose to challenge a Labour MP with her own personal lived experience of racism that she could be seen at her best. She has sometimes found herself a little tongue-tied when speaking the kind of unnatural bureaucratese that ministers often slide into when they feel they have to obfuscate.

This time, by contrast, she spoke from the heart about playground insults, the P-word, and being advised to change her name to get on. So yes, she did understand racism.

The wider point she made was a powerful one – that some “progressive” politicians get annoyed when people from a Bame background do not conform to the stereotype and instead are able to make their own minds up about politics, and support the Conservatives if they wish to.

Again, demolishing the condescending notion on the left that no Bame person could possibly back the Tories will have boosted her internal ratings.

Over the years, Patel has got herself into plenty of scrapes. The most bizarre was the “private holiday” she took while serving as international development secretary in Theresa May’s government. After it emerged that she’s spent time meeting Benjamin Netanyahu, among others, all without the prior knowledge of the Foreign Office or No 10.

The result was a proposal by her to use some of the British aid budget to fund field hospitals run by the Israeli defence force. Theresa May sacked Patel. Boris Johnson has given Patel a second chance but being home secretary is a tough gig, and she hasn’t always shown a sure touch, her perma-smirk being no help to someone supposed to look dead serious at all times. But she showed some real guts in talking about racism and uttering the P-word in the chamber. It was her finest hour.