January 31, 2025 - 7:00am

The “Boriswave” was one of the most extraordinary self-inflicted political and policy disasters in living memory. Having been elected on a mandate to “Get Brexit Done”, Boris Johnson used his new freedoms to unleash an unprecedented wave of immigration.

As the home secretary who presided over that policy, one can understand why Priti Patel continues to defend it. But if Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch is to have any hope of winning a hearing from the voters, she cannot let Patel do so from the front bench.

There are two big problems with performances like the one the Shadow Foreign Secretary put in during her interview with The Sun yesterday, in which she refused to apologise for the huge influx of immigrants that took place on her watch. The first is political: to have any chance of winning back angry ex-Tory voters, Badenoch needs to demonstrate that the Conservative Party has changed, and that it is prepared to own up to what it got wrong in government.

It’s hard to think of what could cut more deeply against that than having the guilty men and women of the old regime using positions on the shadow front bench to defend the most execrable parts of their record.

So far, Badenoch’s response has not been nearly robust enough. In fact, within just two sentences by her spokesperson sits a huge contradiction. “As Kemi said when she committed to a hard cap on visas in November, under her leadership the Conservative Party will tell the truth about the mistakes we made,” said the spokesperson. “While the last Conservative government may have tried to control numbers, we did not deliver.”

But the last Conservative government did not try to control numbers. It sent numbers through the roof, as a matter of policy. What looks superficially like a bold break with the past is actually the opposite: a lie to spare the blushes of the previous government, senior members of which now sit in the shadow cabinet.

The second problem is that Patel’s defence is, in policy terms, total nonsense. She insists the new arrivals were all “skilled workers” — but her Home Office set the salary threshold for “skilled workers” at £25,600, which was well below the average salary. She blames the pandemic and the strain on the NHS, yet healthcare recruitment makes up only a tiny fraction of immigration.

Most egregious is the social care visa, an insane policy that imported minimum-wage workers with no age cap, no restrictions on dependents, and no lifetime costings. A single worker could bring over five dependents and become a net fiscal loss at once; the average Zimbabwean care home recruit brought 10.

They can’t even blame the Blob, although of course Johnson has tried. The Migration Advisory Committee explicitly favoured “funding social care to a level that enables higher wages” rather than the mass import of minimum-wage care labour.

There’s no defending the Boriswave. The Johnson government was elected in 2019 on a promise to bring numbers down by a newly-minted coalition of voters from so-called “left behind” areas; he then doubled net immigration because he needed “hands to do the work” in order — and this is the best bit — to prevent upward pressure on wages.

Badenoch has to disown the Boriswave, outright — and honestly. She needs to say that it jacked up numbers, and why. There is otherwise no reason for angry voters to give the Tories another hearing on immigration.

Such a reckoning would be humiliating for Patel. But having come sixth out of six in the leadership contest, she is a political ghost anyway, tethered to the front bench only by a dearth of alternatives. Like all ghosts, she must wear the chains she forged in life, link by link, and visa by visa. The weight of those chains has already sunk her leadership ambitions; Badenoch must ensure it doesn’t sink the whole party.


Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

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