There have been many moments over the last few weeks when Amber Rudd got herself in a tangle over her response to the Windrush scandal.
Her denial last week of knowing about deportation targets during a home affairs select committee was certainly one. But her fate might have been sealed a week before that, when she addressed MPs to make the first of many apologies.
At about 3.50pm on Monday 16 April, Rudd was in the House of Commons facing questions from MPs and expressing deep sympathy for the “appalling” treatment that some of the Windrush generation had been subjected to.
And who was to blame for this harsh and over-zealous behaviour?
“I am concerned that the Home Office has become too concerned with policy and strategy and sometimes loses sight of the individual. This is about individuals, and we have heard the individual stories, some of which have been terrible to hear.”
To many civil servants in her department, and elsewhere across Whitehall, this was a betrayal.
Mandarins are paid to support their ministers – and by and large they get on with the tasks in hand, even when they might feel personally uncomfortable about the policies they are being asked to implement.
That’s particularly so in a place such as the Home Office – where the creation of a “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants, and the pressure to meet targets for removals during the politically toxic post-Brexit period, has put staff under intense internal and external scrutiny.
They did not expect to be publicly shamed for the work they had been asked to do by the woman in charge. For some officials, Rudd had crossed a line. “These are her policies, the policies of her government,” one source told the Guardian. “And she was trying to blame them on officials.”
In the days that followed Rudd’s criticism of her own department, there was a steady uptick of people across Whitehall who seemed prepared to challenge the home secretary – albeit anonymously.
As the row over who knew what and when rumbled on, the Guardian was leaked two documents that appeared to make a nonsense of Rudd’s claim that her department did not have targets, or that she had not personally seen or set any.
The first was her personally signed letter to the prime minister from January 2017, in which she boasted about wanting to increase the number of enforced removals by 10% or more. More “teeth” was what was needed to get the job done.
The second, dated six months later, was from the head of the department’s Immigration Enforcement unit explaining to her, and a host of other top officials, what his teams had done to reach the target they believed they had been set.
It seems likely now that Rudd was teetering on the brink on Friday night – during that long hiatus between when the Guardian told the Home Office about the second leak, and the response, via Twitter, that Rudd gave nine hours later.
Before she sent the tweets in which she denied seeing the memo about targets, Rudd had apparently needed to talk to Theresa May, who was incommunicado. Eventually, Rudd went public, defended her position, and her cabinet colleagues rallied round.
But by then the home secretary was essentially in a trap. Caught by the language of two separate but related documents, which left very little wriggle room. In the hours that followed, and as her staff doubtless sifted through the other memos, emails, and summaries that land in her office all the time, the truth of what our sources had been telling us must have become all too apparent.
There is a target culture at the Home Office. It’s in the bloodstream of the department and the agencies that are tasked with reaching them.
“The civil service is completely target-based,” said one source. “It is the way of government. The politicians set the targets ... and the civil service gets criticised when we fail to meet them.”