Dearly beloved, in our prayers today we think of the Home Secretary, Sister Mahmood, who must, in her weekly work, endure briefings from Martin Hewitt CBE, QPM.
Mr Hewitt rejoices in the title ‘border security commander at the Home Office’ and he appeared at a parliamentary committee yesterday. Scintillating was not the word. To his CBE and QPM there should perhaps be added the OPD, the Order of Prize Dribblers.
Prone to expansive hand gestures, the commander was windy enough to register on the Beaufort scale. He was certainly blowier than the English Channel in recent months, when hundreds of inflatable boats – ‘water taxis’, Mr Hewitt called them – plied that stretch of water laden with illegal migrants.
What has our hero, leading Labour’s initiative to smash the gangs, been doing to stop this invasion fleet? He has been having meetings. Lots of meetings. When not in meetings he has been travelling abroad, often in the company of important politicians.
‘I was in Iraq and Kurdistan with the Home Secretary,’ he murmured. ‘I was at Lancaster House yesterday.’ He had been on high-level trips to Sarajevo, to Italy with the PM, and he referred proudly to ‘my interlocutors in the French Ministry of the Interior’.
He himself crossed the Channel – albeit in the other direction – to visit some Inspector Clouseau of the Surete. An occasion, one trusts, for le menu gastronomique.
Our border forces were once run by former brigadiers, men of few words but muscular action. Now we have Hewitts. He did serve in the Royal Artillery, rising to Lieutenant, but then joined the police and became a detective. The Meerschaum pipe and magnifying glass were soon discarded in favour of a more managerial career path.
He became the Metropolitan Police’s assistant commissioner (professionalism) and chairman of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, a trade body for top Plods. He took part in some of those Downing Street briefings during lockdown, done up in a swanky uniform. It was Yvette Cooper who gave him the borders commander job. He was Yvette’s kinda guy.
Prone to expansive hand gestures, the commander was windy enough to register on the Beaufort scale
MPs of the home affairs committee yesterday asked how he was getting on with stopping the small boats. Mr Hewitt said these were early days. You couldn’t expect much after merely a year. ‘Pilot stage,’ he explained. Oh.
We should admire, instead, the reorganisation of administrative procedures. There was now a ‘full spectrum approach’ across Whitehall with a ‘fully integrated intelligence picture’. It was showing, cough, that more migrants were arriving than ever before. Fret not. ‘Operational delivery’ would follow. Mr Hewitt leaned back and stroked his left sideburn.
He found it ‘frustrating, really challenging’ (these words were uttered lightly) that numbers of small boats had increased so much. ‘Clearance issues’ had arisen.
Talking of which, he repeatedly said ‘I was very clear’ and ‘it really is important to be very clear’. And there was now ‘clarity over line management’ with ‘intelligence activity migrating across to my line management’.
The committee’s MPs gazed at him a little slack-jawed as he announced, with the pride of a new father, that he had instigated a ‘small boats operational meeting’ every Wednesday.
‘One of the products I have for that meeting is a common intelligence picture, a core intelligence product. That product can be finished and then shared.’
Meanwhile, Eritreans and Ethiopians have been pouncing on the people-smugglers’ boats off French boats, and riding to Dover without buying a ticket. Fare dodgers? They should be right at home on Sadiq Khan’s London Underground.
For the first time in the meeting Mr Hewitt’s voice dropped to one of disgust. He took a dim view of these new tactics by the migrants. Failing to buy a ticket offended his sense of bureaucratic tidiness.
A bearded chap beside him, struggling with a thick head and sucking on a succession of cough lozenges, grunted that such nefarious activity affected ‘the value chain’ of the small boats. The migrants were, furthermore, ‘in breach of safety regulations’.
Poor, poor Shabana.
