Let me make a prediction. Over the next year, Theresa May’s Tories will tack right – but it will not be immediately obvious. The NHS budget will stay ringfenced. Ministers can say what they like about grammar schools, but major changes to education will first need to be dragged past local government, the teachers’ unions and parents.

A letter to Priti Patel, the new international development secretary Read more

No, if you want to see how far to the right our new prime minister will go, watch one area that most papers barely cover. Watch international development.

By development, I mean emergency relief for Syrians bombed out of their homes, healthcare for new mothers and their kids in Sierra Leone and school lessons for girls in Pakistan. Who could be against any of that? The answer is: no one in mainstream politics. It may have been Labour that pledged a target for government aid spending, but it was the Tory-led coalition that made that promise reality so that, of every £100 Britain earns, 70 pence goes to poor countries. That, David Cameron claimed on his last day at No 10, was one of his proudest achievements.

Even then, Cameron heard a constant hum of discontent from the Brexit brigade: taxpayer-funded blimps such as Peter Bone and Philip Davies (he of the recent attacks on “feminist zealots” . Their line never changed: development money funds corrupt Africans and charity begins at home. Penned in for years on the fringes of politics, the Brexit brigade took a big stride on 24 June towards the mainstream of their party. And now one of their number controls spending on aid and development.

In all the hilarity over Boris Johnson sharing Chevening with Liam Fox and David Davis, one of the most remarkable of May’s appointments went almost unnoticed. Because by making Priti Patel international development secretary, the new prime minister placed the department in the hands of someone who is on record as calling for it to be shut down.

If you want to see in which direction Britain’s right wing is travelling, follow Patel’s career. In the same generation as Cameron, she shares none of his anxiousness to “modernise” and claim the centre ground. Patel is an out-and-out rightwinger, of a kind that senior Tories have been trying to keep out of the cabinet for a generation. On Question Time, she called for the return of the death penalty, in parliament she voted against same-sex marriage. The woman who would go on to become employment minister co-wrote a book attacking Britons as “among the worst idlers in the world”. The austerity maven, who spent years banging on about the need to bring down the budget deficit, was last summer asked by a BBC interviewer how much the deficit actually was. She blinked. She squirmed. She patently didn’t have a clue.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Priti Patel calls for the return of the death penalty on Question Time.

Before entering politics, she worked as part of an expensive team of lobbyists at Shandwick on behalf of British American Tobacco. In correspondence unearthed by the Observer, a senior BAT executive complained at the time: “We have felt a sense that Shandwick does not actually feel comfortable or happy working for BAT.” He made an exception for Patel: “Priti [and another employee] seem quite relaxed working with us.” So relaxed, in fact, that as an MP, Patel campaigned against plain packaging on cigarettes.

As for development, our new secretary of state has called it “low priority”. All this is remarkable, as is the fact that Patel has brought along as one of her key aides Robert Oxley, formerly of the TaxPayers’ Alliance. As campaigns director for the pressure group, Oxley spent years vilifying government spending – with a special assault on development. The TPA provided the Mail on Sunday with a good chunk of its knocking copy for its campaign against aid – which made claims so ludicrous that government officials were forced to declare them as “simply incorrect”.

Doubts may have been voiced about the commitment of Patel’s predecessor, Justine Greening. Visitors may have noted that her office at the Department for International Development was festooned with model planes and other memorabilia from her stint at the Department for Transport. But Patel and Oxley have been actively hostile to the jobs they are now being paid handsomely to do. As Stephen Doughty, on the Commons international development committee, says: “These are two of the most ideological critics of aid. They’ve got an agenda to pursue – against the very department they’re in.”

Cash earmarked to help people in poor countries will instead be offered to middle-income giants like India and China

As much as Patel and Oxley detest the aid-spending target, I cannot see them junking it – not when it was in the Tories’ last election manifesto. Much more likely is that they will erode it. Cash earmarked to help people in poor countries will instead be offered to leaders of middle-income giants such as India, China and South Africa, to get them to buy British exports. Look at Patel’s announcement last week of a new “partnership” with India, which promised “support for India to boost economic growth, jobs and trade, which will also benefit Britain”. It contained blah about “smart cities” and equity funds, even a rupee-denominated bond. Only in the very final sentence was there any clue that this document had come not from the former minister for hi-vis jackets, with the casual, dubious claim that “investing in India’s private sector benefits India’s poorest people”.

Looming over this is the shadow of Malaysia’s Pergau Dam, that milkiest of white elephants funded by Thatcher over official objections, in return, it was alleged, for Kuala Lumpur buying British arms. While the first Tory development secretary, Andrew Mitchell, says people “should wait and see what Patel says and does”, insiders have already seen enough. As one former senior DfID employee says: “It’s a choice between a fast death for the department – and a slow death.” That demise will not be prevented by the NGOs, who have gone quiet while awaiting their government grant settlements. Nor will it be mourned by a largely hostile press.

One of the tragedies of this is that over two decades, Britain has led the world in both its commitment to development and its thinking on the subject. And the need for money going to the poorest and most vulnerable people, whether hit by climate change or by war or by decades of underinvestment – often linked to empires such as Britain’s – hasn’t gone away. A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to a Syrian violinist who played at this summer’s Proms. He told me about his home of Damascus, about his aunts and uncles still there. About his neighbours who would sometimes get maimed or killed by a stray bomb. “You can’t have a European heaven while you have a Middle Eastern hell,” he said.