In fact, a question in The Guardian we did answer a decade and a half back:
Why do so many home secretaries fall out with their officials?
Something about the Home Office seems to breed tension, as many of Priti Patel’s forerunners also found
Well, yes, as was pointed out in The Times those 14 years ago:
Perhaps he can’t, for the very job of Home Secretary is something that appears to affect the mind. Possibly it’s the collective mindset of the Home Office itself: we Britons are simply a problem to be managed in the best interests of the bureaucracy, nothing else. You get the impression that Home Secretaries don’t regard our liberties as inalienable; rather they are obstacles to be flattened in the name of smooth management.
The base mindset of the Home Office, the institutional culture, simply is not compatible with a liberal society. There is nothing for it but the Carthaginian Solution.
oh dear, that piece must have set off the alerts in the various snoopers monitoring systems. Hang on, none of them are educated enough to know of Cato
We haven’t got a Scipio Africanus waiting in the wings.