Margaret Thatcher would send Jenrick packing PDQ

On the podcast interview with Gillian Keegan that I wrote about earlier this week, I said to her that I felt the government of which she was a member was doing things that even Margaret Thatcher would have found too right wing. When she pressed me, I suggested the OK-to-break-international law Rwanda policy would not have survived the Thatcher test.

Yesterday former immigration minister Robert Jenrick told the House of Commons that "the law is our servant, not our master." In other words, we make laws for others, and expect them to be obeyed. But if we don't like them, we ignore them.

All I would like to do here is remind you of one of Margaret Thatcher's many memorable quotes.

"The first duty of Government is to uphold the law. If it tries to bob and weave and duck around that duty when its inconvenient, if government does that, then so will the governed, and then nothing is safe—not home, not liberty, not life itself."

Boris Johnson did a lot of bobbing and weaving on the law. Rishi Sunak, despite promising a new era of integrity, professionalism and accountability, has been bobbing and weaving on the law too, not least with his nonsense about ignoring "foreign" courts, when he means an international court to which the UK is signed up, in his desperation to get through a policy he didn't believe in when Chancellor and only pretends to believe in now. And how does his sudden belief that he can summon 150 judges to work on Rwanda cases fit either with the independence of the judiciary, who are responsible for which judges do what, or with the near collapse of the criminal justice system about which he cares less than he cares about what his over promoted deputy chairmen might do.

I had a lot of criticisms of Mrs Thatcher when she was PM. But when she put forward a flagship policy, I never for one moment thought she didn't believe in it, or hadn't examined it from every angle before deciding to make it the flagship in the first place.

As for Jenrick parading as some future contender in a post-Sunak leadership election - which means he thinks he can be Leader of the Opposition and so one day Prime Minister - I doubt he would have got beyond parliamentary under secretary level in Thatcher's day. And if she heard him come out with the nonsense about the law being servant not master, he wouldn't have got that high.