S HE IS PROOF of the enduring truth of Benjamin Disraeli’s description of politics as a “greasy pole”. At first her ascent was smooth—a place on David Cameron’s “ A -list” of candidates in 2006, a safe seat in 2010, a job in the Downing Street Policy Unit in 2013, a seat in the cabinet (as international development secretary) in 2016. But then came the great slide back down. On what she billed as a family holiday in Israel, she held unauthorised meetings with Israeli politicians, including Binyamin Netanyahu, and was summarily dismissed.

In normal times Priti Patel might have spent the rest of her career in the army of blowhards with a great future behind them. In fact, Boris Johnson not only hauled her back into the cabinet in July but gave her one of the great offices of state, that of home secretary. Ms Patel will thus play a central role in carrying out the most important part of the government’s domestic agenda outlined in the Queen’s Speech on October 14th: more “bobbies on the beat”, more stop and search, more tasers and longer prison sentences.

Over the past few years the government has performed so dismally on law and order that it has ceded the initiative to, of all people, Jeremy Corbyn. Knife crime is spiralling. Last year a measly 5.5% of burglaries resulted in a charge. The thin blue line of the police has been stretched thinner than ever by a decade of austerity. Ms Patel’s job is to reverse that unexpected political calamity.

Senior Conservatives believe she may also be a significant electoral asset. Ms Patel represents the beating heart of the new populist Tory party that is growing up alongside the old conservative version. Her parents are Gujaratis who fled Uganda shortly before Idi Amin’s takeover in 1971 and founded first one newsagent and then a chain of them. She was educated at a comprehensive school (it called itself a grammar school but was non-selective) and redbrick universities (Keele and Essex). Gujaratis are a classic commercial minority that combines a fierce entrepreneurial ethic with social conservatism. Ms Patel is no exception.

In 1995-97 she left the Tories to work for James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party as chief press officer. In 2012 she co-wrote a pamphlet, “Britannia Unchained”, which argued that “the British are among the worst idlers in the world” and said leaving the EU would allow Britain to become “Singapore-on-Thames”. (Two of her co-authors are now with her in the cabinet.) Ms Patel was one of the most vocal Leave campaigners in David Cameron’s government.

Leading Tories think that she could do a lot to help win over working-class voters, whom they need to capture to make up for the exodus of liberal Tories over Brexit. Top of the list, of course, are Brexiteers. The Conservatives need to squeeze the Brexit Party’s vote down from its current share of 12% if they are to have any chance of securing a working majority. Ms Patel’s personal credibility with Leave voters is further burnished by the fact that her father once stood as a UK Independence Party councillor. Her no-nonsense views on crime—in 2011 she came out in favour of capital punishment, though she has since modified her position—is likely to go down well in the blue-collar constituencies and seaside towns that the Conservatives are desperate to gain.

The Tories’ list of target voters also includes socially conservative ethnic minorities. In the 2015 election the Conservatives got more than 1m votes from minorities. A post-election survey found that they enjoyed an eight-point advantage over Labour among Hindus and Sikhs. In 2017 lost ethnic-minority votes played a big role in denying the party a majority. Ms Patel is seen as the ideal emissary to aspirational minorities who want to build their own business, give their children a leg-up and fear crime and social breakdown. That a higher proportion of ethnic-minority voters voted for Brexit than for the Tories in 2017 only adds to her appeal.

Can this self-described “massive Thatcherite” live up to expectations? Talking tough on crime is one thing; translating tough talk into effective policy quite another. It is easy to see the promised 20,000 new police officers buried in paperwork and other policies sandbagged by the courts. Being home secretary demands relentless attention to often mind-numbing detail.

The Tebbit tendency

Roy Jenkins, one of the great reforming home secretaries, wrote that, at its best, the department’s hallmark was “meticulous and precise administration”. Peter Hennessy, a historian of Whitehall, describes the Home Office as a “precedent-laden, case-work-driven institution”. A mistake can easily blow up in the home secretary’s face—Ms Patel’s predecessor but one, Amber Rudd, was forced to resign over the Windrush scandal—as well as destroy ordinary people’s lives. But attention to detail and protocol is hardly Ms Patel’s forte, as her Israeli adventure suggests. A supporter politely says, “Her administrative personality is much less developed than her political personality.” A striking number of critical Tories describe her as “thick as mince”.

Ms Patel’s populist version of politics is also a double-edged sword. Many traditional Tory voters have had their loyalty tested almost to breaking-point by the party’s recent mix of establishment-bashing and incompetence. A few tub-thumping words designed to appeal to the hang-’em-and-flog-’em crowd, or a scandal involving lax administration in the Home Office, might break them completely.

The normal rules of politics don’t seem to apply just now—in the past few months Mr Johnson’s poll numbers have ticked up even as he has piled defeat on defeat. Ms Patel’s hardline style might be just what is wanted when the public is fed up with the political class. Repeated reminders that she once supported capital punishment may prove a blessing in disguise. But putting this later-day Norman Tebbit in charge of the government’s central domestic agenda is one more dangerous bet for a prime minister who has already made more than his quota of such gambles. ■