Priti Patel has been MP for Witham since 2010 and has spent the years since as one of the most divisive figures her party has produced, a Home Secretary, a resignation and a bullying finding rolled into one career, and a survivor who keeps coming back. She is now Shadow Foreign Secretary.

What she has is conviction and durability. Patel believes what she says about immigration and the nation state, and she has said it consistently since before it was fashionable on her benches. She came up through public relations and the Eurosceptic fringe, helped lead Vote Leave in 2016, and became the first woman of Indian heritage to hold one of the great offices of state. She has held Witham at every election since 2010, including the 2024 collapse, and she ran for the leadership that year. Whatever the verdict on her record, she has never lacked nerve.

The record itself is harder to defend. Her first cabinet job ended in disgrace. In November 2017, as International Development Secretary, she resigned after holding around a dozen undisclosed meetings with Israeli officials during what was billed as a private holiday, and discussing British aid for the Israeli military without telling the Foreign Office or Downing Street. It was freelancing of a kind that ends most careers, and for a time it ended hers.

As Home Secretary from 2019 the pattern was activity without result. She built her brand on stopping the boats, and small boat crossings rose to successive records on her watch, from around 28,000 in 2021 to roughly 45,000 in 2022. She signed the Rwanda agreement in April 2022 and put the Nationality and Borders Act on the statute book, and not one of the policies delivered the control she promised. The rhetoric was hard. The numbers went the other way.

Then there is how she treated the people who worked for her. In November 2020 the prime minister''s own adviser on standards found that her conduct amounted to bullying and breached the ministerial code, including behaviour that may have been unintentional. Boris Johnson rejected the finding and kept her, and his adviser, Sir Alex Allan, resigned the same day rather than be overruled. Her permanent secretary at the Home Office had already gone, resigning in early 2020 and alleging a campaign against him, with the government later settling his claim. A minister who loses both her standards adviser and her top official has a problem that is not about politics.

Patel was made a dame in Johnson''s resignation honours and shadow foreign secretary by Kemi Badenoch in 2024. She is tougher and more resilient than most of the people who have written her off, and she speaks for a strand of opinion that is real and large. She is also a study in the gap between the promise of toughness and its delivery, a politician who talked about control while the thing she was responsible for ran out of it.