Discrete: Fix the Home Office
If you can navigate Birmingham politics, where community, class and crisis constantly collide, you can handle the Home Office.
In Birmingham, one day in politics is like a year anywhere else. You learn fast, talk straight, and never pretend things are fine when they clearly are not. Denial in Birmingham equates to a certain early death.
Shabana Mahmood brought that mindset to Westminster, and within weeks of becoming Home Secretary, she told Britain what few dare to say: “The Home Office is not yet fit for purpose.”
It was a phrase not heard seriously since John Reid detonated it almost twenty years ago. Reid was one of the most formidable figures of Labour’s Blair years, a Glaswegian bruiser with a PhD in history and the manner of a regimental sergeant-major. A former Defence and Health Secretary, he was sent into the Home Office in 2006 to clean up a crisis known as the foreign prisoners scandal.
That scandal broke when it was discovered that more than a thousand foreign nationals had been released from British prisons without being considered for deportation, some with serious convictions for violent and sexual offences. The revelation exposed years of administrative failure inside the Immigration and Nationality Directorate and led to the resignation of Home Secretary Charles Clarke.
Reid arrived to contain the damage and within weeks declared the department “not fit for purpose.” He then began tearing it apart and rebuilding it, creating the Ministry of Justice in the process. It was a moment of rare candour and reforming energy, and the structure he created endures to this day.
Reid, a tough-minded Scot from the realistic wing of the Labour Party, treated government as a discipline, not a crusade. Mahmood’s instincts are much the same.
It is no surprise, really. She learned her trade in a city that tests its politicians early, breaks the complacent, and tempers the survivors in crisis. Mahmood is one of those survivors. She carries that Birmingham steel into the Home Office, polished now but still visible beneath the lawyer’s calm.
Both she and Reid share the same hard lesson: governing is not theatre, it is endurance.
A culture of collapse
The Home Office is where administrative ambition goes to die. It has become a clearing house for emergencies: asylum backlogs, housing shortages, police failures, IT chaos, and procurement scandals. Each incoming minister promises to “get a grip”, but the hand slips away almost as soon as it is placed on the wheel.
Mahmood’s diagnosis is unusually direct. She talks about contract mismanagement, staff churn, and the inability to hold talent. These are not ideological failings but managerial ones. For once, a Home Secretary has named the real disease, a culture that survives on reaction, not design.
Her predecessors from the Conservative years used the department as a backdrop for moral theatre. Suella Braverman and Priti Patel saw every failure as proof that Britain needed more punishment, more fences, more anger. Mahmood sees the failure as structural, not spiritual. That alone marks a quiet revolution.
Enforcement and evidence
She knows she cannot abandon enforcement. The public expects action on illegal working and asylum misuse. But where others led with slogans, Mahmood leads with numbers, an apparent sixty-three per cent rise in arrests for illegal working, and a clear admission that the law “has not kept pace” with modern labour markets.
That is realism talking, not rhetoric. Mahmood is not boasting; she is diagnosing. But the diagnosis runs into the modern reality of enforcement. When the BBC followed officers through south London for two hours, not a single arrest followed.
In truth, the whole operation was probably doomed from the start. Every delivery rider in the city sits inside a digital survival network, WhatsApp groups that light up the moment the authorities gather in one place. Within minutes, the word spreads, and the crowd simply melts away. Enforcement becomes a kind of theatre: the cameras roll, the uniforms appear, but the targets have already vanished.
From Reid to Mahmood
There is an unmistakable echo of John Reid’s realism in her voice. Reid saw the Home Office as a managerial catastrophe disguised as a ministry. He took it apart and rebuilt the map of government itself, creating the Ministry of Justice in 2007. That one act alone stands as proof of his political craftsmanship.
It was more than a quick fix; it was structural surgery. By splitting off prisons, probation and courts policy, Reid lightened the Home Office’s load and brought long-term coherence to the justice system. Nearly twenty years on, that institution feels as though it has always been there, a permanent part of the landscape.
Reid did not have enough time to finish the wider reform, but he saw what most ministers never do: the machinery of government itself can be the problem. He named the disease, cut where he could, and left behind something that worked.
Mahmood is cut from similar cloth. Her project is less about remapping and more about resetting, reforming culture rather than structure, ending panic cycles, stabilising procurement and building morale. Where Reid wielded the scalpel, she is cleaning the wound.
The Reid Standard
Two decades on, we are still talking about John Reid. That alone tells you how rare a minister he was. Whatever one thought of his politics, he brought a discipline and dynamism that few could match. In a department where most ministers drown in paperwork, Reid managed to leave a wake.
He was one of the best politicians of his generation, blunt, effective, unafraid to tell his own government when it was failing. He did not get enough time to finish the job, but the impact was seismic. So sharp was his assessment that twenty years later, new ministers are still quoting his words and living in the shadow of his verdict: not fit for purpose.
Prime Ministers play musical chairs with ministerial posts to hang on to power, and the cost is continuity. Reid never had the luxury of time, only the force of will. Yet even that was enough to change the tone of government.
Shabana Mahmood feels like a sweeter version of Reid, calmer but every bit as clear-eyed. It is a high compliment, and it fits. Like him, she is realistic, rooted, and tough beneath the lawyer’s polish.
The Birmingham touch
That Birmingham grounding matters. Mahmood grew up and built her career in a city that has seen its share of political noise and bureaucratic failure. Birmingham has lived through insolvency, boardroom brawls, and a public weary of empty promises.
If you can navigate Birmingham politics, where community, class and crisis constantly collide, you can handle the Home Office. The city teaches pragmatism, quick thinking, and how to keep calm when the system melts down.
Her approach reflects that civic realism: straight talking, quietly competent, never theatrical. She is the sort of politician the Midlands produces when ideology gives way to practicality.
A new Labour realism
Keir Starmer’s government is built on this kind of tone. After a decade of chaos, its offer is calm, managerial and pragmatic. Mahmood’s admission that the Home Office is unfit is part of that strategy. It is brutal honesty deployed as political strength.
The public may forgive delay if it sees discipline. What it will not forgive is more performance politics.
Mahmood, a barrister by training and a Birmingham MP by temperament, brings both intellect and street realism. She knows that the first duty of any Home Secretary is not to sound tough but to make the system work.
That is why her words matter. In a department addicted to drama, she is prescribing quiet competence.
Fit for whose purpose?
The deeper question is not whether the Home Office can be fixed, but what it is for. If it exists only to stage symbolic battles about borders, it will always fail. If it exists to run a lawful, humane, efficient system of immigration and security, it might just succeed, if someone is brave enough to rebuild it quietly.
That is the promise hidden in Mahmood’s understatement. To fix the Home Office, she will have to do the one thing none of her predecessors managed: replace noise with order, and ideology with method.
Is Mahmood cut from the same cloth as Reid? The early signs suggest yes. But what will be the verdict in twenty years’ time? She will still be young enough to be politically active, which, for the rest of us, is enough to make us feel very old indeed.