Who is Amber Rudd? Like Shirley MacLaine or Nicole Kidman’s face, the new home secretary has had lots of past lives. One involved working as an investment banker and a venture capitalist. But she decided to drop that and enter politics to get “a grip on her life”. (We are reading that as “It’ll be fewer numbers and things, won’t it? I hate numbers.”) Another life saw her as an “aristocracy co-ordinator” on The Favourite Film of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (AKA Four Weddings and a Funeral). This involved starring as an extra in a church scene and recruiting minor aristos Lords Burlington and Lord Woolton to the already capsizing-with-poshness cast. We can only speculate as to what the rest of the job involved, but we assume it saw her reading the pages of Tatler and its sister publication Teen Tatler (recent feature headline: “Keep calm and have a bath”).
We also predict that it has lots and lots to do with her role as home secretary and that it will see her casting Theresa May’s new cabinet in a remake of the Richard Curtis film. May herself would take on the role of the stoically fashionable Kristin Scott Thomas, Boris Johnson would glide into Hugh Grant’s part (a complex role, but Johnson can act, as proved by the fact he was able to keep a straight face when he ascended to foreign secretary), and then Rudd, in another transformation, could pop up as acting vacuum Andie MacDowell. Inevitably, she will put her own spin on the classic dialogue. Her Andrew Marr-ready response to any tough questions about immigration? “I hadn’t noticed.”
