The Tragedy of Amber Rudd
Did you ever hear the tragedy of Amber Rudd? I thought not, it’s not a story the Conservatives would tell you. It may not be a tragedy of the Star Wars sort, but it’s hard to view the death of Amber Rudd’s political career as anything other than somewhat tragic.
Rudd was born into a very upper-middle class family in Marylebone, the daughter of a stockbroker and a magistrate. Her upbringing was fairly typical for those of such circumstances: she attended independent schools, followed by a history degree from Edinburgh university. She first tried her hand at working in the financial industry, where she was a director of a family-affiliated investments company from the age of 24.
It was soon after this that she married A.A Gill, the outspoken former Times columnist with whom she had two children. Alas, this marriage was not to last, and she and Gill separated and then divorced after just five years of marriage in 1995. Gill’s death of cancer in late 2016 would mark beginning of a very strange and difficult time for Rudd.
Not long before the end of her marriage to Gill, Rudd briefly worked in a position that would lead to much ridicule from many on the left after she became Home Secretary — she was the so-called ‘Aristocracy Co-ordinator’ on the film Four Weddings and a Funeral.
By 2005, she had been through a long career in finance, and Rudd decided to try her hand at electoral politics. She was the Conservative candidate for Liverpool Garston, where she came third with just short of ten percent of the vote — no surprise as it was a safe Labour seat in Liverpool, not exactly a Tory heartland. However this clearly grabbed the attention of newly-elected Conservative leader David Cameron, who in the wake of the 2005 general election drew up the now famous A-list: a list of female, minority, and other preferred Tory candidates for the 2010 general election. Indeed, this list contained a great number of now-familiar faces, such as Karen Bradley (the NI Secretary), Liz Truss, Party Chairman Brandon Lewis, Andrea Leadsom (who would run against Theresa May for the party leadership after the resignation of Cameron), Work and Pensions Secretary Esther McVey, and, of course, one Ms Amber Rudd.
After narrowly winning her seat of Hastings & Rye in 2010 with a majority of just shy of 2000, Rudd’s ascension was fast. In fact, it was to be the fastest ascension to a great office of state since the Second World War. On the back benches Rudd became a champion in the campaign against female genital mutilation, spoke out in favour of higher female representation in the upper echelons of government, and chaired an all-parliamentary enquiry which called for (and led to) the introduction of mandatory sex and relationships education in all secondary schools. She was the very epitome of what one-nation conservatism seems to strive to be. In late 2012, after just over two years as an MP, Rudd was promoted to the position of Parliamentary Private Secretary to the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, a fellow one-nation, liberal Tory.
In this position, she became one of Osborne’s protégés, something that many have quipped may be less of a blessing and more a curse in the post Cameron and Osborne Conservative Party, as was laid bare by May’s brutal sacking of Osborne upon her appointment as Prime Minister in July 2016. Soon after she was appointed as an assistant Government Whip, and then as a junior minister at the Department for Energy and Climate Change under Lib Dem Ed Davey.
After the Conservative’s surprise victory in the 2015 general election, Rudd got Ed Davey’s (who lost his South London seat) old job as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, a position in which she served until Cameron’s resignation as PM fourteen months later.
It was then that Rudd’s family connections first caused her strife politically — her brother Roland (a prominent supporter of Labour and the now chairman of Open Britain) was the founder of a lobbying firm involved in Hinkley Point C, which Rudd, as energy secretary was responsible for.
Obviously, this wasn’t a major roadblock for Rudd — upon Theresa May’s appointment as Prime Minister, Rudd got May’s old job of a Home Secretary, one of the four Great Offices of State. However, this was viewed by many to be a poisoned chalice, particularly after May’s incredibly long tenure, where she became the longest serving Home Secretary in over 100 years.
This appointment at first appeared to be the stepping stone to party leadership for Rudd, but was actually the beginning of her downfall — May had planned out and put in place a number of arguably illiberal policies — policies that Rudd would now not only have to defend, but further. The first sign of these policies was at the Conservative Party Conference 2016; Rudd’s first as Home Secretary: she was forced to introduce a policy of companies and schools having to publish lists of foreign employees and students — a move that the liberal, one-nation Rudd would have been repulsed by.
That wasn’t the only immigration based scandal Rudd — would be involved in. Barely a year later, in September 2017, she faced condemnation from much of the media for how she acted in ordering the deportation of Samim Bigzad back to Afghanistan, despite being ordered on three occasions by the high court not to. Eventually, after a great deal of criticism in the media, Rudd relented, and allowed Bigzad to return to London.
During the 2017 election campaign, Rudd seemed to become May’s stand-in, appearing on her behalf for the TV leaders debate, and in the process became the butt of jokes about May’s laziness , including a quip from Tim Farron about watching Bake-Off being a better use of time than watching Amber Rudd attempt to defend May. In the end, she was far from rewarded for her performance; seeing her majority cut to just over 300, and only winning after a number of recounts. To add insult to injury, this was just a few weeks after the death of her father, making this doubtless a very difficult couple of months for Rudd.
She also provoked the ire of civil libertarians in trying to push through the so-called Snooper’s Charter, which provides the Government with wide reaching online surveillance powers. Just a few months later she announced new government plans to censor parts of the internet that were feared to promote extremist activity; worrying many in the process that it was quite a slippery slope towards greater government censorship.
Having presided over rising crime figures in a number of areas, Rudd had to defend Government policy around cutting police finding and numbers, and found herself at the receiving end of attacks by Labour’s Yvette Cooper, a former Shadow Home Secretary under Ed Miliband, and now the chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee. Crime figures of course rose most visibly in London, particularly in early 2018, leading to criticism of both her and the Labour Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan — largely on partisan lines, with left-leaning publications blaming Rudd, and right-leaning publications primarily blaming inaction by Khan.
It was none of these myriad scandal that brought down Rudd however, but instead the Windrush Scandal in April of 2018. It had been uncovered that the Government had been threatening the people of the Windrush Generation (particularly those who arrived pre-1973) with deportation unless they could prove they had indefinite right to remain in the UK. The next few weeks became nothing but an exercise in putting out fires for Amber Rudd: she waived citizenship application fees for those involved and offered financial compensation, leading to many accuse her of merely trying to distract from the issue at hand. then she ‘inadvertently misled’ a parliamentary select committee on a number of occasions over Windrush and Home Office deportation targets, first by claiming that the home office had no such targets and that such targets were ‘not how [they] operated’, however this was revealed by The Guardian to be a mistruth, causing her to row back and claim that the home office did have targets, buts she didn’t know about them. But this too was a lie — she knew about the targets. Throughout this all, she faced constant calls to resign, particularly from her opposite number within Labour, Diane Abbott.
This had, however, become one fire too big for her to put out: she resigned on the night of the 29th of April, just a few weeks after the beginning of the scandal. It was immediately obvious that a large reason why she resigned was in order to save May’s political skin — it was May who had been Home Secretary for the six years preceding Rudd, and it was May who had presided over much of this. This plan to sacrifice herself to save May seemed to work: the calls for blood from the opposition returned to their normal levels almost immediately after Rudd’s resignation.
Her successor, Sajid Javid, the first BAME Great Officer of State, has had a monumental task thrust upon him: running a notoriously scandal-prone department, and cleaning up the mess of the Windrush Scandal.
Now on the backbenches, Rudd has returned to somewhere where she had spent very little time, given she became a minister within two years of election. There is of course much speculation about whether or not she will become one of the much-maligned ‘Brexit Rebels’ considering her very pro-EU beliefs and her reputation for having been the most Europhile member of May’s cabinet during her tenure at the Home Office. Whatever you may believe about Rudd and her beliefs, it is difficult to deny her downfall was a spectacular waste of political talent.
