The tragedy of Amber Rudd. A thread.
1. Amber Rudd is the most senior liberal Tory moderniser. She rose fast and was pugnacious during the referendum campaign.
2. The May leadership campaign coalesced from a group determined to stop Boris that formed on the night of the referendum.
3. Its members opposed or ashamed of May's immigration policy but believed that she could be the best block against a hard brexit.
4. At the beginning they seemed to be right. And May initially promised a unifying moderate Brexit.
5. I certainly know people who've known her a long time who can't fathom her transformation into a drawbridge-up opponent of immigration.
6. But May's backers miscalculated. She took the hardest of lines on immigration and Brexit.
7. What was Rudd to do? The purist course would have been to resign, but people who resign so easily don't make it to the top of politics.
8. Instead it looked like May and her Nick Timothy inspired nativism would be here to stay, and people who wanted a office in contemporary Tory politics had to make their peace with it.
9. So she did. She announced the list of European staff at that Birmingham conference. She must have hated he policy.
10. For her compromise, she was denounced in the Evening Standard -- by her own brother
11. That was the price paid for power, and for the chance to make a difference, and eventually get to the top job, where, everyone believes they'll have the power to right the wrongs they needed to make to get there.
12. After the election, May's nativism had been shown a failure, and the nativist in chief waa cast out to the Daily Telegraph
13. Rudd began to make amends: most obviously by getting the Migration Advisory Committee to conduct objective research on migration
14. It had previously been on a tight leash and limited in the questions it could ask and the answers it could supply
15. To turn around a decade of policy (this began with Yvette Cooper under Brown) is hard enough at the best of times
16. It's harder still when the department is the Home Office and it knows your boss opposes you.
17. Now the windrush scandal has come to attack the Home Secretary most likely to hate it since Ken Clarke
18. She should be allowed to continue to clear up her predecessor's mess and the effects of her own moral compromises.
19. The tragedy is that she may not get the chance. Ends.
