SHE is back on the backbenches now, representing Witham, but Conservative MP Priti Patel has left her mark in UK politics, particularly on the country’s immigration policy, in the three years as Home Secretary.
Highlights of her tenure between July 2019 and September 2022 include implementing a points-based immigration system, an asylum deal with Rwanda to address the English Channel migrant crossings, the passage of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Act 2022 and the extradition of Julian Assange to the US.
Patel is popular among Tory grassroots for her own brand of Conservative politics, and was a polarising politician. But there is no doubt she was adept at handling one of the great offices of state.
Entering parliament in 2010, the turning point in her political ascent was when Patel became one of the leading voices of the Vote Leave campaign in 2016 during the Brexit referendum.
She went on to become only the fourth woman to be Home Secretary and the second from an ethnic minority background (fellow Tory MP Sajid Javid was the first).
Prime minister David Cameron was the first Tory leader to spot her potential. He named her a champion for the Indian diaspora, a role that ceased to exist with his departure from government.
In 2014 she was appointed as the exchequer secretary to the treasury, and the following year, after the general elections, Cameron promoted her to minister of state for employment, attending cabinet. In 2017, Cameron’s successor at Downing Street, Theresa May, made Patel the secretary of state for international development – a department that has now merged with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to become the FCDO.
However, Patel left her post in November 2017 for not telling her bosses that she had met Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior figures from the Israeli government on what was a private holiday to the country.
She returned to the backbenches but did not stay there for long.
May was succeeded by Boris Johnson and in recognition of Patel’s popularity among some rank-and-file Conservatives, especially those who worked on Brexit, the prime minister brought her back into Cabinet as the Home Secretary in the summer of 2019.
Three years later, she would find herself telling her boss he had no choice but to resign as prime minister.
Immigration and asylum pose a challenge for any government, but Patel has been nothing but steadfast in her policy choices.
In December 2020, the government launched a points-based immigration system and opened the Skilled Worker Visa, marking the UK’s biggest shift in immigration policy in recent history.
Reviewing the new system on its first anniversary, Patel said: “One year on, our system is making it easier for businesses to hire the skills and talent they need, while incentivising investment in our domestic workforce, boosting wages across the country.”
She introduced her New Plan for Immigration to ‘reduce the pull factors’ in the asylum system and in April last year signed a world-first Migration and Economic Development Partnership with Rwanda.
This will see migrants who make dangerous or illegal journeys, such as by small boat or hidden in lorries, have their asylum claim processed in Rwanda.
Announcing the agreement, she said: “The global migration crisis and how we tackle illegal migration requires new world-leading solutions. There are an estimated 80 million people displaced in the world and the global approach to asylum and migration is broken.
“Existing approaches have failed and there is no single solution to tackle these problems. Change is needed because people are dying attempting to come to the UK illegally.”
Patel claimed the new agreement would help break the business model of human traffickers and prevent loss of life, while ensuring protection for the genuinely vulnerable.
“Access to the UK’s asylum system must be based on need, not on the ability to pay people smugglers. The demands on the current system, the cost to the taxpayer, and the flagrant abuses are increasing. The British public have rightly had enough. That is why we are overhauling this broken system,” she added.
Patel, who turned 50 last year, comes from a family of immigrant shopkeepers.
Her parents, Sushil and Anjana, ran a convenience store in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, before they arrived in the UK in the 1960s and settled in Hertfordshire. They established a chain of stores in Britain.
As home secretary, Patel set out plans to crack down on abuse and violence against shop workers, making assaults committed against shop workers an aggravated offence in the PCSC Act, resulting in tougher penalties.
“As the daughter of shopkeepers, I know what a vital role they play within our communities and just how tirelessly they have worked during the coronavirus pandemic,” she said.
“I will not tolerate violence and abuse against any shop worker and it’s right that those who commit these crimes must be caught and punished.”
Patel considers herself as one in the mould of Margaret Thatcher, and her 2012 book, Britannia Unchained, written with political colleagues Kwasi Kwarteng, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore and Liz Truss, is an untrammelled vision of how Britain might be if Thatcherism was in the ascendancy.
Patel’s views have prompted accusations she was “anti-immigrant”, but she has refuted these allegations.
Delivering a speech on immigration in May 2021, she dwelled upon her own immigrant roots, stressing that her system would put ‘fairness’ at the centre of immigration while tackling illegal entry into the UK.
“It is an undeniable fact that immigration has and continues to enrich - in every sense of the word - our nation immeasurably,” she said.
“I am a proud as a Briton and I am proud of my parents and of my British Indian background. And I join the millions of British Indians and children of migrant families who have established a life in one of the greatest countries in the world.
“But there are many who struggle with this concept. They do not speak for the silent majority who look to their government to establish appropriate measures and controls on who comes to and settles in the UK.”
Patel went to a comprehensive school in Watford, before going on to study economics at Keele University and then pursuing postgraduate studies in British government and politics at the University of Essex.
She is married and has a son.
