No quality is more admired among the political classes than that of having "a safe pair of hands". And no department of state demands more of its senior minister in that respect than the Home Office, a place where if it can go wrong, it almost certainly will. Just occasionally a home secretary, such as the liberalising Roy Jenkins in the 1960s, will succeed in putting his stamp on legislation that both endures and benefits society. But that is not really what home secretaries are for. Whereas success for other ministers is measured in positives―better educated children, easier journeys to work or shorter waiting lists for operations―the job of home secretaries is to stop things: to stop crime from getting (or appearing to be) out of control; to stop the prisons from exploding; to stop the creaking , administration of justice from collapsing; to stop too many poor foreigners coming to live in Britain; to stop drugs from flooding the streets. And so on. Although almost everyone realises that these are inherently intractable problems, at best managed rather than solved, home secretaries are forced by political convention to pretend that they are "tackling" them. That makes home secretaries, even more than anyone else in government, vulnerable to things happening for which they are nominally responsible but over which they have no control.
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