The Week in Review: Clegg brings Theresa May under control
Theresa May had a bad reshuffle.
On the plus side, she kept her job. The statuesque home secretary is enjoying her record-breaking three year stint in the graveyard of political careers. But Nick Clegg managed to box her in again, bringing more obstacles to bear on her authoritarian instincts.
Jeremy Browne, who was typically thought to be one of Clegg's better performing troopers, was yanked out the Home Office and thrust back onto the backbenches. He's always been viewed with suspicion by Lib Dems. The man sounds like a Tory, says Tory things and even looks like a Tory. Some Liberal Democrats are starting to suspect he may actually be a Tory.
He raised a lot of eyebrows when he wrote that Lib Dems should "own" all government policy. That view, you might not notice, is not a million miles off suggesting the party should meld with the Tories, given that it eradicates the differences between them.
But Browne's real problem was that he failed badly on the so-called 'racist vans'. The GO HOME ads were given the green light without the Lib Dems' man in the Home Office knowing anything about it. And having discovered it, he failed to stop it.
The Home Office presents the gravest danger to the Lib Dem's ability to keep their remaining supporters, because civil liberty and privacy issues are so key to the liberal (small and large 'L') brand. Clegg's people were particularly aggressive in setting the message when it came to the snooper's charter veto. That included a rather public humiliation for the home secretary, when the deputy prime minister used his weekly radio phone-in show to rule it out.
Behind the scenes, Lib Dems have long been trying to erase May's more robust efforts. They got her to cancel a £40,000 income benchmark for foreign spouses, for instance, and move it down to £18,600.
Clegg decided Browne had gone native at the Home Office and sent in Norman Baker. Baker looks more like a train spotter than Che Guevara, but don't let the mundane exterior fool you. Underneath, he's quite the radical. He thinks an Iraqi hit squad killed UN weapons inspector David Kelly and that Robin Cooke may have been murdered.
The press had a field day with all that, but far more important are his civil liberties credentials, which are impeccable. Clegg has managed to get a dyed-in-wool libertarian into the Home Office. And the best part is he didn't even bother telling May it was happening. Neither, for that matter, did David Cameron. The home secretary was spitting blood.
By the end of the week, the Lib Dems were flexing their muscles again, ruling out a proposal for private landlords to check the immigration status of those renting properties from them. The plans are quite mad anyway. They wanted to fine landlords who failed to do the check a heache-inducing £3,000, but there was precious little help for them to differentiate the maddening variety of immigration statuses on offer, not to mention the hundreds of forms of ID valid in the EU alone. Soon enough, it would have inevitably led to discrimination.
The Lib Dems stepped in and had it restricted to a pilot project in a single area, with no expansion before the election.
Other problematic proposals in the immigration bill – such as getting doctors to check immigration statuses – unfortunately made it through unscathed. The Lib Dems are hardly all powerful. But in important areas they are restraining the home secretary from being quite as authoritarian as her predecessors. Some policies, like the income benchmark for foreign spouses, are under the radar. Some, like the snoopers' charter, are emblematic. The constant is that the Lib Dems' influence over the Home Office is strengthening.
Clegg knows which side his bread is buttered. He needs to ensure there are no civil liberties howlers between now and voting day, or the rank-and-file may finally give up on coalition. Baker is his man in the Home Office. Beyond the fun and games of his views on Kelly, it's a small and important triumph that Clegg managed to sneak him in.
