Chris Philp has been MP for Croydon South since 2015 and has risen faster than almost anyone of his intake, through five government departments to the cabinet table and now to the shadow Home Office. The ascent is the most striking thing about him. The judgement is the problem.

Before politics Philp built something. He co-founded a distribution company, Blueheath, floated it, and saw it absorbed by Booker in 2007, and he was named an emerging entrepreneur of the year in 2003. That is a real record of private enterprise, rarer on the green benches than the party that celebrates it likes to admit. He won Croydon South in 2015 after losing Hampstead and Kilburn to Glenda Jackson by 42 votes in 2010, and he held Croydon South in 2024 with a majority of 2,313 while Conservative seats fell around him. He works, and he wins where others lost.

Philp rose through Justice, the Home Office, culture, the Treasury and the Cabinet Office by being reliably on message, and the message has not always survived contact with reality. As Chief Secretary to the Treasury in September 2022 he was among the loudest defenders of the Truss mini budget, reportedly rating it 9.5 out of 10 at conference and tweeting that sterling was strengthening on the back of it. The pound then fell to a record low and the tweet was deleted. When the package collapsed he distanced himself from it. A minister who cannot tell a fiscal crisis from a triumph while standing in the middle of one has a judgement problem, not a presentation problem.

His signature brief shows the same gap between confidence and command. As policing minister and then shadow home secretary he has built his profile on a hard line on immigration and asylum, the defining Conservative cause of the period. In April 2024, defending the Rwanda policy on Question Time, he appeared to ask whether Rwanda was a different country from the Congo, to open laughter from the audience. He said he had trouble hearing. It was the kind of moment that sticks because it confirms a suspicion, that the confidence runs ahead of the command of detail.

For all the offices, there is no reform, no Act, no idea that the country associates with his name. He has been a competent occupant of jobs and an unembarrassed defender of whoever held the leadership, from Johnson, whom he served until resigning in the collapse of July 2022, to Truss, to Sunak, to Badenoch, who made him shadow home secretary in November 2024.

Philp is able, hard working and electorally durable, and that is not nothing. He is also the model of the modern frontbencher who treats every government line as defensible until the moment it is not. The talent is real. The conviction is harder to locate.