Shabana Mahmood is moving from dealing with a creaking-at-the-seams prison service as justice secretary to an even more pressured asylum system as home secretary.
The department she will now head up will be making dynamic shifts to counter the public mood on immigration and grooming gangs.
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What a moment for the Home Office mantle to be grasped by the first Muslim woman to occupy one of the great offices, taking charge of the police, MI5 and the government’s domestic direction of travel at a time of great flux.
She has also become the home secretary of a country where the national flag is being hoisted as a symbol of dissatisfaction – with anger at the arrival of desperate migrants crossing the Channel in small boats.
Shabana Mahmood arrives at Downing Street after being appointed home secretary. Pic: PA
Ms Mahmood picks up the in-tray of a home secretary who has been forced to make moves that often seemed to defy her natural position – tougher rules on asylum seekers, proscribing a pro-Palestinian group of activists, and ordering an inquiry into grooming gangs.
But perhaps all this will come more naturally to our new home secretary.
The Oxford-educated MP is considered a “blue Labour” social conservative.
Only last month she announced that foreign criminals will be deported after sentencing to free up prison space and protect the public.
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On the issue of Asian grooming gangs, she recently told former Tory Cabinet minister Michael Gove in the Spectator that “there is still a moment of reckoning”, adding “there is still an outstanding question of why so many people looked the other way”.
She studied at Lincoln College, Oxford, where she managed to win the vote of Rishi Sunak to become junior common room president, and she used her electioneering skills to help Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer win the general election.
She had declined a position in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and became crucial to Labour’s regeneration, describing her role as “dragging them back to a position of common sense”.
Ms Mahmood will need that antenna for public opinion in the months to come.
