It’s difficult to recall any minister in recent years, let alone a Home Secretary, who has been lauded with such praise for command of their brief as Shabana Mahmood over the past week. Even those who are far from convinced that her plans to reform the asylum system will do the job intended are mostly fulsome in their regard for her.
As Keynes once put it: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’
But if there is one nagging doubt, it is that Mahmood appears to have swung dramatically from her earlier stance in opposition as an identikit Labour politician – when she embraced most of the usual left causes and demonstrated none of the independence of mind which now seems to be one of her most compelling traits.
In 2014, for example, she was part of a protest at a branch of Sainsbury’s in Birmingham which forced to store to close because it was selling goods produced in the occupied West Bank. And in 2019 she not only signed a petition demanding a ‘general amnesty’ for all illegal immigrants in the UK, she gave a series of interviews about her demand – the polar opposite of the policy she outlined this week.
The criticism being made is that, far from being engaged on a ‘moral mission’ which she has spoken about this week, she is simply unprincipled and ready to do anything to, as ones of her critics, Labour MP Cat Eccles, memorably put it, ‘appease the electorate’.
In that context, it is worth looking at the career of one of her predecessors as a Labour Home Secretary, David Blunkett – because the now-Lord Blunkett went on a similar, indeed even more dramatic, trajectory. The parallels between their development are instructive to a rounder understanding of Shabana Mahmood’s thinking. I wrote David Blukett’s biography in 2004 precisely because his move from being seen as the archetypal ‘loony left’ council leader in the 1980s to one of the most hardcore Home Secretaries of any party seemed to me both an interesting political journey in its own terms, but also a metaphor for Labour itself.
As leader of Sheffield City Council from 1980 to 1987, Blunkett was so representative of the prevailing Labour left that the city was dubbed the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire. He and the council dubbed Sheffield a ‘nuclear-free zone’, supported the National Union of Mineworkers in the 1984-85 strike, and fought against ‘rate-capping’ in 1985 by refusing to set a budget. He was so popular as a tribune of the left that he was elected to Labour’s National Executive Committee.
But this was the same man who within a few years was instrumental in supporting Neil Kinnock’s expulsion of Militant entryists and who as Education and then Home Secretary came to be seen – rightly – as one of the most New of New Labour ministers.
It is possible to dismiss all this as being the journey of an unprincipled charlatan who – as with Ms Mahmood – is acting out of political expediency rather than any more elevated motive. Possible, yes. But wrong. As Keynes once put it: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’
Blunkett became a political heavyweight because his intellect was supple enough to see where he was wrong and how he needed different answers to some of the same questions he had been asking as a more immature politician.
We don’t yet know enough about Ms Mahmood, who has not even been in post for 100 days, to know whether this is similarly true of her. But every indication so far is that far from simply blowing with the political wind, she has grasped that the real world is not as she once saw it. That is, surely, something to welcome and to admire, rather than a stick with which to beat her.
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