The Daily Mail claims that Jacqui Smith ordered a news blackout in an attempt to ensure that embarrassing details about illegal immigrants working in sensitive government security jobs were not revealed.
She knew in August, and possibly as early as July, that around 5,000 people with no right to work in the UK had been cleared by the Security Industry Authority, emails leaked to the paper purport to show. One was employed guarding Gordon Brown's car. Eleven others were working at Scotland Yard.
One email, dated August 20, from a senior Home Office official suggests:
"Given that the Home Office and the SIA do not currently know the full scale of these problems, Press Office continues to recommend strongly that no public announcement is made."
As John Reid, Charles Clarke and any of the other home secretaries of the past decade will readily verify, you don't go long in the job before running into a political storm.
Smith has spent four relatively trouble-free months in the post, in part possibly because of the summer recess but no doubt also because she impressed during her early days, when she had to deal with terrorist conspiracies in London and Glasgow.
A cursory glance through comments posted to the Daily Mail site indicates few readers are feeling charitable to either Smith or the government as a whole. The revelation raises a major question mark over Brown's commitment to greater openness in government, the paper says.
This is an edited extract from the Wrap, our digest of the daily papers.
