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What was going on with Home Office officials as Amber Rudd, the now ex-Home Secretary, floundered? Hugh Ind, director general of Immigration Enforcement, who wrote the memo to Rudd that indicated the Home Office did have immigration removal targets, may have questions to answer.

In emails seen by The Londoner, Ind emailed Rudd’s team to say “there were no targets”, both before and during the Home Affairs Select Committee session last week, according to a Home Office source, and this email was the basis of Rudd’s confusion. During the same session, Ind also sent an email saying that he didn’t recognise the “description” of targets and that targets were not allocated regionally and nor could they be, according to the source.

After sending that email, Ind apparently wrote another saying “there are no removal targets for immigration enforcement officers, regional or national”. Ind is also said to have admitted that “in the relatively recent past targets were allocated out of Immigration Enforcement, not by himself or the Home Secretary, but they were allocated”. This would mean Rudd had been receiving confused information from the civil servants who were there to support her. There are more questions, too for another top civil servant, Glyn Williams, the director of Immigration and Border Policy Directorate.

“I would never describe my officials as incompetent,” Rudd (left) told MPs at a select committee hearing in January 2017. But Williams was sitting next to her last week when the question “are there regional immigration removal targets?” was put to Rudd by Yvette Cooper MP. Rudd says she wasn’t aware so she asked Williams, who said: “There are no published removal targets and there is nothing broken down by region, as far as I know.”

Ind is also chair of the Home Office Race Board holding meetings with Black, Asian and Ethnic advocacy group THE NETWORK and Tessa Jowell’s Principal Private Secretary at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport between 2001 and 2004.

The Londoner contacted Ind for comment this morning.

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The Elba clan turns up the wattage as E-Prix arrives in the French capital

Earlier this month, Sienna Miller was the star attraction at the Rome leg of the Formula E E-Prix, a motor racing championship using only electric cars.

This weekend it was Idris Elba’s turn to represent the UK as the race reached Paris. The Wire actor was with fiancée Sabrina Dhowre, daughter Isan Elba, 16, and four-year-old son Winston at a packed schedule of events.

He has a few reasons to celebrate of late: he and Dhowre are planning their wedding after Elba proposed at a screening of one of his films in February. His new film, Avengers: Infinity War, is breaking box office records after its release last week. His autobiographical comedy In the Long Run has received rave reviews this month. And he has just announced that he will star in and produce a new programme for Netflix, Turn Up Charlie, in which he plays a bachelor DJ enlisted to work as a nanny to a wild child.

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Owen swerves first date with Johnny

Johnny Mercer, Conservative MP for Plymouth Moor View, and Owen Jones, Guardian columnist, were set for a big date in Plymouth — Jones wanted to unseat Mercer, who said he’d accompany him on the doorstep and duke it out. But fate intervened. Mercer quipped: “What??? Owen?! You can’t just cancel a first date like this.. you could have at least called.” Jones replied: “Unfortunately, while first dates aren’t regulated by legal spending limits, political campaigning is, so we’ve had to postpone our Plymouth campaign day to abide by the law.”

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Michael Martin, former Speaker of the House of Commons, died yesterday. The SNP’s Angus MacNeil recalled: “On my maiden speech in the Commons, Michael Martin kindly indulged and protected my use of Gaelic, making the 2005 moment the longest I think any Celtic language was ever used in a Commons speech.”

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Trinny Woodall shares her tips for the office. “There is a certain way to negotiate with men,” the makeover queen tells Spectator Life. “In 1996, I started a column for the Telegraph. After a few months, I went back and negotiated the contract with Charles Moore, the editor. I said, ‘This is what I want’ and he agreed.”

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Shriver foresees the death of Facebook

Author Lionel Shriver predicts a Facebook-free future. “I have hopes that social media will become unfashionable,” she tells us, “Millennials may be smitten with Twitter, but I could see the following generation being disillusioned, wanting their lives back, becoming private again, having real friends.” Shriver also reflected mixing her politics too deeply with her fiction:

“I wouldn’t want to write books that ... alienate the readership that doesn’t share my opinions. If books ever stop exploring a deeper level of experience than this temporary polarised factional filter on the world, then the books will be s***e.”

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SW1A

Labour campaigners for Thursday’s local elections met Victoria Beckham on the doorstep in Holland Park this weekend. Activist Frankie Leach confirmed: “She’s not a Labour voter.” But is Posh a Tory? Bandmate Geri Halliwell called Margaret Thatcher “the first Spice Girl” but backed Tony Blair in 2001 in a Labour election broadcast. Geri told fans it was “important” to vote — before it emerged she was not registered.

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Labour’s Chris Williamson is no stranger to controversy: he backed Marc Wadsworth, expelled for heckling Jewish MP Ruth Smeeth, and described Windrush as “genuine racism” (implying anti-Semitism isn’t). A former employee of the Derby North MP says: “The irony! I set up Williamson’s Twitter account. Now he’s blocked me.”

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As Amber Rudd drafted her resignation last night, MP and former Culture Minister Ed Vaizey was a juror at the Shakespeare School’s Foundation Trial of Richard III. He supported the shock verdict of finding the murderous king not guilty.

“People spin him, and me, as duplicitous, lying, Machiavellian and power-grabbing, but that’s just unfair”, he said. “Why would he use murder to get his way, when a couple of Facebook ads or a sign on the side of a bus would have done the same thing?”

Acknowledging the Windrush controversy which led to Rudd stepping aside from the Cabinet, he pondered: “I think Richard had ambition. But not a target.”

Quote of the Day

A little confronting to arrive in London, pick up your morning paper and read today’s headlines’

Kevin Rudd, former Prime Minister of Australia, was shaken by the “Rudd resigns” bulletins today