The case against Amber Rudd is getting stronger

The home secretary’s defence is that she had no idea what was going on in her dysfunctional department

Amber Rudd, the home secretary, has not handled the Windrush scandal well. When the select committee that monitors her department asked if pressure to meet targets for the removal of illegal immigrants might have exacerbated the problems of people trying to prove their right to be here, she said: “We do not have targets for removals.”

As this was patently untrue, she was forced to come to the House of Commons the next day and said: “I have never agreed that there should be specific removal targets.” She sought to minimise the importance of the targets that did exist, and said: “The immigration arm of the Home Office has been using local targets for internal performance management. These were not published targets against which performance was assessed.”

It would seem that this offended someone who knew that she had received a memo last June, telling her the Home Office had set “a target of achieving 12,800 enforced returns in 2017-18”. That memo was leaked yesterday, and there was a delay before Ms Rudd issued her response: she had not seen the memo; she should have been aware of the targets; she was sorry; and she would be making a further statement in the Commons on Monday.

This amounts to a defence of not having a basic grasp of what was going on in her dysfunctional department. This is not exactly reassuring, although it is politically more survivable than admitting to wilfully misleading parliament.

The prime minister was obviously persuaded that Ms Rudd’s resignation would be damaging to the previous home secretary – one Theresa May, originator of the policy of creating a “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants, which caused such heartbreaking problems for undocumented but legal immigrants.

Ms May would no doubt claim that her policy reflected public opinion, which wants to restrict immigration as much as possible and expects heavy-handed action against illegal immigration in particular.

Not only that, but the prime minister has to bear in mind the balance in her cabinet on the European question, and she knows that Ms Rudd is one of the big guns on the side of those arguing for a softer Brexit.

Ms Rudd has also received some support from the opposition. John Woodcock, Labour MP for Barrow and Furness, said there was “no question” she had made a serious mistake, and “there is now clearly a significant question mark over her competence”. But, he went on, “Labour has more common ground with her than so many of her potential successors – we should be careful what we wish for.”

The Independent is sympathetic to this argument. Two days ago, we argued that Ms Rudd had “shown some genuine intent to fix the mess”, and that it would be “unjust that she should have to carry the can for a policy that was overwhelmingly devised by Ms May”.

Now that the evasions and omissions of her statement to the Commons on Thursday have become clearer, the question is whether the balance has been tipped in favour of resignation. Is it more important to punish her attempt to cover up and minimise her apparent ignorance, or to keep her on the pragmatic grounds that she would probably be a better home secretary than any of the likely alternatives?

In our view, the scales have not yet been tipped. Ms Rudd has not been entirely straight with parliament about her department’s failings, but she is not guilty, as far as we know, of a flagrant breach of the Ministerial Code. She has decided – presumably having checked the paperwork to make sure her initials are not on incriminating documents – to tough it out, with the prime minister’s support.

But there is a price to be paid, and both Ms May and Ms Rudd will find they have less capital in the bank of political credit next time.