When Shabana Mahmood was clapped into the Home Office after her promotion to Home Secretary last week she told officials: “You bring your A game, and I’ll bring mine, and we’ll get on just fine”.
It is this attitude that is raising hopes among Labour MPs and insiders that Mahmood can get to grips with the Channel small boats crisis, which is now plaguing Sir Keir Starmer’s Government as much as it did Rishi Sunak’s or Boris Johnson’s.
Senior Labour insiders almost all agree that Mahmood has replaced Cooper as Home Secretary because she is more likely to take radical action and is more in tune with voters concerned over the small boats crisis.
Allies see Mahmood as a political “street-fighter” who “gets things done” and is now a key figure in the prospects of Starmer’s premiership, alongside Rachel Reeves, with migration to define the next election alongside the economy and cost of living.
Her task is not an easy one. The issue of small boats and migrant accommodation dogged Johnson and Sunak, but has hit a political tipping point under Labour’s watch and helped power a popularity surge for Nigel Farage’s Reform.
A record 111,084 people applied for asylum in the first year of the Labour Government, while the number of asylum seekers housed in hotels rose 8 per cent to 32,059 after an escalation in Channel crossings, new data released last month revealed.
There have been widespread protests outside migrant hotels, that led to an embarrassing court loss which ordered the closure of The Bell Hotel in Epping, which the Home Office successfully appealed.
Migrants board a dinghy to cross the English Channel in Gravelines, France last month (Photo: Carl Court/Getty)Reform is reaping the benefit – gaining a record 15-point lead over Labour according to the latest BMG poll for The i Paper, and voter unhappiness is leading to the controversy of the raising of St George’s flags in towns throughout England.
It also showed most voters thought Reform would better be able to tackle small boats.
If Labour has any hope of re-election, it must get to grips with immigration.
Two sources summed up Mahmood’s approach with an anecdote from her previous role.
“When she was at Justice, there was a conversation between her and a senior civil servant, who bristled and said, ‘That’s a very strong steer minister’, and Shabana’s retort was: ‘I only give strong steers’.”
Understanding Mahmood’s background is key to understanding her politics, as the Tory ex-cabinet minister Michael Gove has argued.
A second-generation immigrant with Pakistani descendants, Mahmood grew up above her parents’ corner shop in Birmingham, an experience which gave her “traditional working-class values”.
The Home Secretary also takes inspiration from her Muslim faith, having previously talked about viewing life “as a gift from God but… also a test from God”, and this inspires her commitment to public service.
Her social values also come from her Muslim faith, for example opposing assisted dying.
Mahmood is also “tough on law and order” having grown up in a high-crime area, where the till was stolen so often from her family shop that they instead started keeping the money in a tray hidden under the counter.
“She is small c social conservative,” the source close to the Home Secretary said.
Mahmood campaigning before the general election in her Birmingham and Ladywood constituency(Photo: Nicola Tree/Getty)Small state view
Economically, she believes that the state should be an active participant in the market, and backs Reeves’s commitment to borrow to invest, but not for day-to-day spending, and is in favour of reindustrialisation.
But Mahmood also has a “small state view” partly inspired by her upbringing as a second-generation immigrant growing up above the shop where it was important to run a tight budget.
“There is a little bit of Margaret Thatcher above the Grantham shop about that, she is obviously different in her view, she doesn’t want to strip the state back and get everything out the way,” a source close to the Home Secretary says.
“But there is something about counting the pennies and the pounds will count themselves about the way that she sees the state, and therefore is concerned by the degree to which the Civil Service has grown and the feeling among the public that we are spending more and more but getting less and less.”
Mahmood has recently spoken about her admiration for Margaret Thatcher, telling Gove, now editor of The Spectator, in May when asked about her political heroes: “Well, I tend to go for the women that broke the mould. Who came through in tight patriarchal systems – Benazir Bhutto, Margaret Thatcher – not for the substance of their politics, but for what they represented for women and the ability to make a contribution.”
As a result of all this, Mahmood is often seen as part of the Blue Labour movement.
But another ally said: “I think she plays up to being right wing, but I don’t think she is as right wing as people think she is.
“I think her instincts come from voters, from working people.
“She is much more man-in-the-street-focused than anything ideological or party political.”
The ally added: “There is part of Shabana that is a little bit more populist, her approach will not be based on left-right ideology, it will be based on what is going to work.
“Ultimately she wants to make decisions and succeed at what she does, so she will find a way to balance all the nods people expect and to make it work.”
Shabana Mahmood, right, replaced Yvette Cooper, left, as Home Secretary (Photo: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Getty)A Labour MP and ally of Mahmood added: “The difference between Yvette and Shabana is Yvette had, rightfully or wrongfully, a reputation for not being as decisive and that’s not what you’ll get from Shabana.
“Shabana is less focused on background noise and more driven by results and is exactly what we need more of.”
Mahmood’s moral case for tackling migration
But sources suggested that perhaps Mahmood’s defining difference as Home Secretary to Cooper is that she feels the moral case for gripping the Channel crisis differently, including a deep concern for the safety of Britons with an immigrant background if social consent for incoming migration frays.
“She feels it very strongly, there is something about being a second-generation immigrant whose parents came here the right way – she and a lot of people in her constituency feel particularly aggrieved by people essentially jumping a queue that they queued up in, she’s got a sense of the unfairness of it,” a source close to the Home Secretary says.
“She’s also got a strong sense that people like her are not safe in a country that doesn’t have secure borders – to have community cohesion we need secure borders, and if you don’t then everybody [from an immigrant background] no matter who they are, or how long ago their family moved here, are more at risk in a society that starts to turn on itself.”
In her previous role as justice secretary, Mahmood already launched an attempt to reform the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), and The i Paper can reveal she is also weighing up a potentially even more controversial move to look at the Refugee Convention, in a bid to make deportations easier by making it harder for judges to block them.
As well as looking at international conventions, Mahmood is going to attempt to accelerate the Government’s plan to close asylum hotels – the visible flashpoint of the Channel crisis that so anger voters.
While Labour has promised to shut the hotels by the next election expected in 2029, Starmer, and now Mahmood, have made clear they want to go faster after a summer of far-right influenced protests at the sights and the ongoing legal battle over The Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex.
A protest camp outside RAF Scampton on 6 February, 2024 in Scampton. Mahmood is considering re-opening the base for housing migrants (Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty)Opening up military sites and changing treaties
The Home Secretary is not yet thinking about a new deadline but is working with the Ministry of Defence to open up military sites as asylum accommodation, and will have a better idea of the capacity to move people out of hotels once that work is finished.
She is understood to be looking at both new military sites and those previously earmarked for asylum seekers, such as RAF Scampton, the former home of the Dambusters.
Mahmood is also looking to expand the one-in, one-out returns deal with France and strike similar agreements with other countries.
Labour MPs concerned about small boats believe Mahmood will be more willing to rip up conventions and orthodoxies than Cooper.
“She starts with ‘we are going to fix this’ rather than ‘these are the constraints’,” one “Red Wall” MP said.
But she is also facing immediate demands to speed up the timetable to shut asylum hotels and deportation, with a second MP saying: “I want to see her set a deadline for hotel closures in months not years and step up the visible enforcement and removals of those who shouldn’t be here”.
Others think Mahmood will be better equipped to take the political fight to Farage and Reform on the airwaves, after proving she can convince the public that Labour has a plan to tackle dire problems with her prisoner early release scheme to ease jail overcrowding, launched quickly after the election without Labour taking too much political damage.
An ally said Labour avoided a kicking over releasing prisoners “because she set out a clear reason, a clear process they were going to follow and a clear explanation – that kind of honest communication: this is the situation we are in, this is how we are going to have to deal with it, if we don’t our prisons are at capacity, there is no other way of releasing the pressure”.
The ally said the Home Secretary can take a similar approach to asylum hotels.
“We don’t know what Yvette’s team were doing on this, there were so many mixed messages and so much lack of clarity – whatever Shabana intends to do will be communicated.”
The MP who called for a faster timeline to close asylum hotels added: “Shabana is a fighter; and someone who take the fight to the Tories and Reform – because she gets the politics in a way Yvette didn’t.”
Mahmood and Starmer are “not that close as friends” but he “respects her and trusts her” and “professionally they work well” together, the ally said.
She has proven key to the leader’s election chances before, as a national campaign co-ordinator in opposition, that was kept in the role for longer than she liked because “she was so important to the internal party operation, she sat at the nexus of all the parties’ internal avenues and alleyways and essentially was the political fixer”.
“Her instincts and her convictions were so good and so strong and so trusted by the people around Keir they couldn’t afford to promote her sooner,” the ally added.
And she is once again set to take on a key role.
Then-justice secretary Shabana Mahmood gives a speech during the Lord Mayor’s Banquet at the Guildhall in central London in December (Photo: Henry Nicholls/AFP)“[Small boats] and the economy and the cost of living will be the three things that are on the ballot paper at the next general election, and Shabana is responsible for a huge chunk of that,” the ally said.
The source close to the Home Secretary added: “It’s a huge responsibility being home secretary at any time, but it’s obviously a huge responsibility now.
“She is aware of the scale of the challenge and she is up for it.”
Her role is a ‘poisoned chalice’
However, a party insider warned the role “could be a poisoned chalice” given how tricky a problem the Channel crisis is.
“But if it somehow goes right then she’s gonna be the hero of the Labour right,” they added.
Some even tout Mahmood as a future leadership contender, at a time when the Prime Minister’s position is being increasingly questioned in Labour ranks.
An MP said: “Shabana is a political machine in her own right, she’s actually very astute and is very self-aware, she doesn’t suffer fools and is refreshingly very clear about her values and convictions, she’s congruent and in this day and age that gives her a leadership edge as people want clarity.”
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