The numbers don’t look good. In the latest ConservativeHome survey of the cabinet, Amber Rudd lies third from bottom with a net satisfaction rating of -48.3. Only Philip Hammond and Chris Grayling score worse. Let that sink in for a minute. Tory party members believe the work and pensions secretary is doing an even worse job than Theresa May, Liam Fox and Gavin Williamson. That bad.
But politicians are a thick-skinned bunch who tend to have a far higher estimation of their own worth than those around them. So with the prime minister tipped to be heading for the exit come the summer, Rudd is one of many who reckons she might just be in with a chance of replacing her. After all, a remain candidate is likely to make it down to the final two and Rudd has more personality than all the other remainers in the cabinet combined. And would the Tory party really be suicidal enough to choose Boris Johnson as its leader? The country might never forgive it.
Make no mistake, Rudd fancies her chances. After all, even if she doesn’t end up with the top job she can still be a player with a big say in the final outcome. And with a big say, might come a bigger job than work and pensions secretary. So last week she put her head above the parapet by writing a joint opinion piece in the Daily Mail insisting May took a no-deal Brexit off the table. An offence that in more normal times might have got her the sack, but now didn’t even merit a slap on the wrist.
For her latest hint-dropping exercise, Rudd took herself down to the offices of the disability charity Scope in the Olympic Park in east London to announce changes in personal independence payments for pensioners. Rather than having to prove they were still disabled, old people could now be trusted not to be skiving. Brilliant. You can always tell when ministers are on manoeuvres, because they invariably try to reinvent themselves. The past no longer exists. Instead we are at Year Zero. New year, new you.
For this latest iteration, the old home secretary Rudd has been erased. The woman who was happy to implement the hostile environment polices introduced by her predecessor – one T May – has been removed from the record books. She never existed. Rather she has refashioned herself as something of a rarity. A work and pension secretary quite unlike Iain Duncan Smith and Esther McVey. One who actually didn’t see all claimants as potential enemies of the state.
This was touchy-feely Rudd. A woman who had been personally touched by disability through her father’s blindness. She didn’t think to mention that her father had also been censured by the Department of Trade and Industry in 1986 and found unfit to be a company director, because that was a tale of Old School Conservatism. One for another day. Rather she wanted people with disabilities to feel part of one big Work and Pensions happy family. She wanted everyone to feel happy and included. To have as much money as they needed and to fulfil their potential. She’d like to teach the world to sing.
Things got slightly testy when the minister was reminded most disability charities were far from convinced by her newfound empathy and that it had been a Conservative government back in 2012 that had gone out of its way to label anyone in a wheelchair as a scrounger. That was then and this is now, Rudd said tartly. It had all been a mistake that had never happened. Now she was just focused on happy things.
Rudd was also asked about rumours that No 10 had tried to muzzle her for going soft on Brexit and poor people. Her eyes darted shiftily around the room, trying to hunt down a Downing Street mole. “Um, of course not,” she said. “I’m here, aren’t I?” It wasn’t the most convincing of replies. There would clearly be hell to pay when she got back round the cabinet table. She just had to bite the bullet and keep her eye on the main prize.
Still, at least Rudd was having a better time of it than Grayling, who found himself the subject of a three-hour debate on why he was so hopeless. Unlike the previous day when he couldn’t even bring himself to the Commons to answer a question on the £33m payout to Eurotunnel, the transport secretary did at least turn up to defend himself. Though he needn’t have bothered as every time Failing Grayling opens his mouth he just makes things worse.
His department had done exactly the right thing by doing the wrong thing, he insisted. Doing the wrong thing was what every government department should be doing. Opposition MPs stared at one another in amazement. There really was no point. After all, you could barely begin to scratch the surface of Grayling’s catastrophes in just three hours. Next time they would ask the speaker for a full six-day debate. And even then …
