Will the real Shabana Mahmood please stand up

I doubt I’ll ever be able to sit down with Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, and interview her for this magazine or another. It feels unlikely, given what she says and what I write. What follows definitely won’t help my case. Still, if I could speak to her, journalist to politician, there is one question I’d be keen to ask: was that really the point?

Mahmood is in her mid-40s and she joined the Commons at just 30. She got selected as a candidate in the 2000s, back when it wasn’t exactly common for Muslim British-Asian women to become elected representatives. In that first parliament, she was one of only three female Muslim MPs.

She managed it, though. It must have been a proud moment for her family, as her father had been chair of the local Labour party for a long time. What a joy it must have been, too, to get into government last year after a decade and a half out of power – her whole political career – and to become Britain’s first female Muslim lord chancellor.

It goes without saying that her promotion to the Home Office in September must have seemed like the crowning glory of it all; what she’d been working towards all these years. A great office of state, before even reaching 50! Two months have passed since her appointment and again, I’m desperate to ask: was that really the point?

Earlier this month, Mahmood announced that the two million people who moved to the UK legally between 2021 and 2025 will now have to wait for ten years to get settled status, up from the five they were promised when they came here. The wait will jump to 15 years for low-paid workers who arrived between 2022 and 2024. Many of those people will have children or hopes to build families; career plans and other ambitions that will now be much more uncertain, through no fault of their own.

Elsewhere, she said that refugee status would no longer be permanent, and instead be reviewed every 30 months. Furthermore, according to her plans, the state will no longer have a legal requirement to provide support to asylum seekers who would otherwise be destitute. Another plan being floated more informally would involve following Denmark’s lead and confiscating the jewellery of refugees arriving at the border in order to pay for their accommodation.

In a crowded field, that last proposal may be the most grotesque one to date. It also feels quite stingingly ironic: what better way to defeat the people smuggling gangs than to act exactly like them?

Now, there must be some politicians out there who are climbing the greasy pole and yearning for power because they loathe immigration and want Britain to be a smaller country again. I could name some of them, and I’m sure you could too. The puzzling thing is that it just doesn’t seem clear that Mahmood was ever one of them.

Back in 2015, nearly a decade to the week, she spent three days in a refugee camp in Greece and wrote about it for the New Statesman. The report is a poignant one, and recommended reading.

“We have a moral duty to act,” Mahmood argued. “When the refugees make it to the shores of Lesvos they are not just on Greece’s doorstep but our doorstep too… We have to work with our European partners and create new, safe, and legal routes for refugees to get to Europe. We cannot abandon them to their fate, left as prey for smugglers whilst risking death on the seas.”

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“It does feel as though an age of chaos has descended,” she concluded. “Crises everywhere, millions on the move, nuclear-armed world powers on different sides… and in the midst of the chaos ordinary people are running. You would run. I would run. They are running. We must do our part to help them.”

She bided her time and worked tirelessly and finally, she got in a position where she was able to help those people. Instead of doing so, she chose to veer so far to the right that Reform now mocks her and argues that she may well be one of their own. The policies aren’t even helping her failing government, which is now as unpopular as Boris Johnson days before he resigned. There is no point to any of it.

Shabana Mahmood may never want me to interview her but that’s fine. What she could do instead is reread her own words and ask herself now the question she opened her New Statesman piece with, namely: “what am I doing here?”. We’d all love to find out.