The curse of the Home Office will strike down Suella Braverman (again) before long

The post of home secretary has been jinxed ever since David Blunkett had to resign in 2004, writes John Rentoul

Better home secretaries than Braverman have been seen struck down by the haunted office (PA)

It is a rotten job, the Home Office, Roy Hattersley told me. “In government, you’re waiting for somebody to break out of prison every day. In opposition, you’re hoping somebody will break out of prison so you can complain about it.”

The former deputy leader of the Labour Party was explaining why he advised Tony Blair to take the post of shadow home secretary. Blair made a stunning success of it, using his “tough on crime” policy to catapult him to the party leadership. But Hattersley had no idea what a jinxed job the secretary of state for the home department was about to become.

Prison escapes were not the problem – and indeed could not be after 2007, when John Reid, the outgoing home secretary, split the department in two, with prisons going to the new Ministry of Justice. But since the time of Blair’s second home secretary, David Blunkett, the post has been attended by a succession of personal and political disasters.

Blunkett resigned in 2004 after three-and-a-half years when it was reported that his private office had tried to fast track the renewal of a work permit for the nanny of his former lover. It was a crossing of the line between the personal and the official that was to be echoed 19 years later by Suella Braverman, asking civil servants if they could arrange a private driving awareness lesson for a speeding offence.

Is that where the curse began? Blunkett was a special guest this year at the “Blair Years” course that I teach at King’s College London. He described his time at the Home Office as “very difficult”; the department was “pretty good in a crisis” but “absolutely terrible at reforming incompetence”, infected with “out-of-date thinking” and “a belief that they really couldn’t change the world for the better so why bother”. This applied to crime, where New Labour made “an enormous difference”, said Blunkett, but also to immigration, “where I’ve never come across a more incompetent set-up in my life”.

The Home Office curse also saw to his successor, Charles Clarke. Early in Clarke’s tenure, he promised to make sure that foreign prisoners would be deported at the end of their sentences – or that they would at least be “considered for deportation”. But in 2006 the Home Office admitted that it had released a further 1,000 foreigners without considering them for deportation, and that was the end of Clarke – not just of his ministerial career but, as with Blunkett, of his ambition to be prime minister.

Reid took over, declared the department “not fit for purpose”, split it in two – and the curse resumed with Jacqui Smith, left in charge of the larger part. The first female home secretary, she became, after just two years, the highest-ranking skittle to be knocked down by the MPs’ expenses scandal. It was a complicated story about a spare bedroom in her sister’s house being her main home, given indelible colour by the claim for two pay-per-view adult videos.

After Alan Johnson’s short stint at the end of the Labour government, Theresa May defied the Hattersley Rule with the longest tenure as home secretary since James Chuter Ede in 1951. It was a brilliant defensive performance that demonstrated the importance of not making mistakes in politics, allowing her to become the first politician in modern times to go directly from the Home Office to No 10.

The jinx started again with Amber Rudd, May’s first home secretary, who resigned before two years were up over a muddle about her evidence to a select committee on whether the Home Office had targets for the number of deportations.

She was followed, after a brief and luckless stint by Sajid Javid, by Priti Patel, brought back to government by Boris Johnson. She survived for three years, thanks to the unusual manoeuvre of a prime minister prepared to overrule his independent adviser on ministerial interests. Sir Alex Allan, the adviser, concluded that Patel had bullied officials, without meaning to. Johnson didn’t agree, so Patel stayed and Sir Alex resigned. But her popularity among Conservative Party members suffered, especially after she seemed unable to stop the small boats coming across the Channel. She wasn’t even a candidate in the leadership election to replace Johnson, and Liz Truss replaced her as home secretary with Braverman.

Truss was not in office for long, but Braverman’s tenure was even shorter. She was sacked after six weeks for sending a confidential document to John Hayes, a Tory backbench MP and supporter. But then she was back, five days later, when Rishi Sunak took no chances in putting together his cabinet. He needed a visible representative of her brand of anti-immigration Toryism in his unity government.

It did not take long, though, for the curse of the Home Office to strike again. Braverman may survive her latest ethics problem, but the speculation is that she will soon be looking for an excuse to resign over policy. She is assumed to be intending to run as the right-wing candidate for the leadership if the Tories lose the next election. But to do that she needs to get out before she can be held responsible, as Patel once was, for failing to get the immigration numbers down.