Priti Patel: ‘My son sees what I put up with – I tell him to turn off the news’

We are hurtling along the East Coast Mainline when Priti Patel reveals a side that I have never seen before. We are discussing her 13-year-old son, Freddie, when suddenly the Home Secretary’s eyes start to well up.

It seems the Left’s Public Enemy No 1; the woman branded “inhumane”, “cruel” and “unfeeling” over her Rwanda immigration policy does have a heart, after all.

“My son is just wonderful,” she says. “He puts up with a lot, which someone that age shouldn’t have to put up with.” Thankfully, the teenager she shares with Alex Sawyer, her husband of 18 years, (a marketing adviser and Conservative councillor) has not been subject to any abuse himself.

But as the 50-year-old tells me in what turns out to be the most candid interview she has ever given: “He knows what I have to put up with.”

She adds: “There have been days when I’ve told my mother-in-law, who my son is with a lot of the time, ‘don’t let him see any news, you have to just turn it off.’”

Admitting to suffering from mum guilt “all the time”, she goes on to describe how Freddie’s birthday was ruined two years ago.

“We just brought the family together and were doing something at home in the garden. The day was completely wrecked because we had some small boats issues [in the Channel].

“He and my husband are the anchors in my life – they are the two most understanding people. But the rest of my family were like: ‘What the hell are you doing?’

“I’m afraid that is normal. It shouldn’t be normal, but it is.”

As proudly strident as her political heroine Margaret Thatcher in her views on everything from immigration to policing to the EU, since she won her seat in Witham in Essex in 2010, Patel has become one of the most vilified women on social media – even a tweet remembering the Labour MP Jo Cox, six years on from her murder on Thursday, the day we meet in Wakefield, is enough to spark a frenzy of trolling.

One post likens Patel to the Harry Potter villain Dolores Umbridge, while countless others attack her appearance, with frequent references to her ‘un-Pritiness’.

Wearing a royal blue dress with a white jacket, teamed with cream leather loafers from Carvela, today it becomes clear there is even a rather girlie side to the woman who famously advocated the death penalty on Question Time in 2011.

She asks to see a picture of my outfit at Royal Ascot this week. “I love the races but with everything going on I wasn’t able to go,” she says. “I love going out and part of that is looking good.”

We discuss the bright pink dress and matching hat she wore for the Platinum Jubilee Thanksgiving Service for the Queen earlier this month. I wonder if she has any help with her wardrobe?

“I don’t have help but I do know where to go for those sorts of outfits. It’s important we dress well because we are representing Her Majesty’s Government.”

As we hit the campaign trail in the village of Durkar, south of Wakefield, where the Tories are fighting to hold their seat in Thursday’s by-election, it’s fair to say Patel has had a rather challenging 48 hours

On Tuesday night, the first flight due to take asylum seekers from the UK to Rwanda was cancelled minutes before take-off after a late intervention from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

Following days of legal arguments in the UK, the Home Secretary had been given the go-ahead to begin the deportations, before the court in Strasbourg intervened, arguing an Iraqi man faced “a real risk of irreversible harm” if he remained on the flight.

A Boeing 767, chartered at an estimated cost of £300,000, had been due to take off at 10.30pm from a military airport in Wiltshire but by 10.15pm all the passengers had been removed from the plane, which then returned to Spain.

Naturally the issue comes up on the doorstep as Patel knocks doors to rally support for the Conservative candidate Nadeem Ahmed, who is hoping to retain the constituency following the resignation of his predecessor, Tory MP Imran Ahmad Khan who was jailed for 18 months in May for sexual assault.

As she strides confidently through the quiet cul-de-sac, two men unloading equipment from a van shout: “Keep up the good work, you want to get rid of them lawyers!”

“We’ll start using scheduled flights soon, it’s outrageous what’s going on!” she replies.

Speaking to Janet McCallum, 74, at the door of her neat, semi-detached home, Patel remains characteristically bullish.

“I’m pretty unapologetic about illegal migration, primarily because our country has just been so prone to it for such a long time,” she tells the pensioner. “If I’m really honest, it was that burning stone that all my predecessors left in the corner to simmer away. And I was the one who picked it up. It is deeply challenging, but we have to deal with it. It’s my duty and responsibility because no one else will do it.”

Insisting “we are incredibly fair as a country”, she adds: “Even on my watch, we’ve done a lot for people from Hong Kong, Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine.

“That’s the right thing to do, but you know, these gangs have been operating for decades, on the back of lorries.

“The party that Nadeem is up against in this by-election is completely against everything I’m doing, which means we’re on the right side of the argument. And we stand up for British values and the British people – and that really, really matters.”

There is no mistaking the cobalt blue shades of the Iron Lady that Patel is unashamedly trying to channel as she insists that the “very personal” criticism she gets from the Left only serves to embolden her further.

“Labour gaslights me all the time,” she tells me later, as we wait to board a train back to London. “They say, ‘you’re a racist, you don’t understand’. My view is, you don’t have my background or the lived experiences that I have, so how dare you?

“I was one of the first ever politically to say that the Labour Party has taken communities like mine for granted. Thinking that people of colour are so stupid that we’re just going vote en masse for Labour. It’s so patronising.”

On the abuse, she adds: “I take the view, well, if that’s their only argument, and that’s how they behave, that’s a terrible reflection on them actually because I’ve been brought up much better than that. I’ve been brought up with a lot of values and that’s important to me. They would just love me to collapse, but my service is to my country and to the British people. I can’t spend my time worrying about what people are saying about me.”

Early responsibility

As the eldest daughter of Ugandan Indians who came to the UK in the mid-1960s, Patel grew up being used to standing out from the crowd. When her parents moved to leafy Radlett, Hertfordshire in 1983, they were “one of the few Indian families there.” Raised in a Hindu household, her father Sushil and mother Anjana ran the Chocolate Box newsagents on Radlett High Street where a young Patel would come home from Westfield Academy, a comprehensive in west Watford, to help stack shelves and help out with the VAT returns.

“I used to sit at this big desk and do my homework and then sort of flick through the pile of papers,” she recalls.

Elder sibling to a sister and a brother, who is 14 years her junior, Patel had a lot of responsibility from an early age. “We didn’t have much family time. I would hardly see my parents because they were working seven days a week,” she says. “They’d be up at the crack of dawn, we’d go to school, and then I’d come home from school and look after my siblings.

“We lived very frugally, there was no wastage. I remember going to the cash-and-carry after school. These are the things that really shaped me; shaped who I am.”

That – and watching her father’s business blossom under Thatcher’s rule. “It was just a fascinating time for us. We’re a very humble working class family and our lives changed in the 1980s.

“I remember when Mum and Dad first put an extension on that house and I remember my father saying to me: ‘We can only do this because we have the freedom to succeed’. I also remember them getting a new car,” she says.

“Dad taught me how to buy shares; he was always looking at investment opportunities. We started out with nothing, so we loved Thatcher in our house.”

Cecil Parkinson, Conservative party chairman under Thatcher and later, William Hague, paid the odd visit to the shop as the MP for Hertsmere.

“He literally just said to me, ‘haven’t you joined the Conservative Party yet?’” she recalls.

“I was quite taken aback. I wasn’t at university at the time; I think I was still in school. I wasn’t that politically minded but I did love the news. I would sit in the shop reading all the newspapers as well as everything else I was tasked to do. Anyway, then he wrote to me and said: ‘Fill this form in’, so I did.”

Patel went on to study economics at Keele University before pursuing postgraduate studies in British government and politics at the University of Essex. After graduating, she became an intern at Conservative Central Office before heading up the press office of the Referendum Party, a single-issue Eurosceptic party, in the mid-1990s.

She returned to the Tories in 1997, before leaving three years later to work for Weber Shandwick, a PR consulting firm, and later Diageo, the alcoholic beverages company, before going back to Weber Shandwick in 2007 as director of corporate and public affairs. Her closest friends these days seem to be people she worked with, rather than her old classmates.

“I’m not in touch with anyone from school” she admits. “But I have a close circle of friends who are the biggest anchors in my life. They’re the ones who phone me up at the weekend and check in. I had a message from one friend last night, which said: “Thinking of you, just sending you some support”.

The Class of 2010

Having tried and failed to be elected as the Tory MP for Nottingham North in the 2005 general election, Patel was finally successful five years later in Witham, a new constituency in central Essex created after a boundary review. Tipped by David Cameron as one to watch, she won with a majority of 15,196 and was swiftly drafted into the No 10 policy unit after three years as a newbie.

Along with fellow Conservative MPs Kwasi Kwarteng, Dominic Raab and Liz Truss – now her Cabinet colleagues – Patel was considered one of the “Class of 2010” who represented the party’s “new Right”. Together with Chris Skidmore, they co-authored Britannia Unchained, a book published in 2012 that advocated reducing the size of the welfare state and emulating the working conditions in countries like Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea rather than those of other European nations.

In 2015, she was promoted to employment minister under Iain Duncan Smith at the Department for Work and Pensions, helping him to reform the welfare system through the introduction of Universal Credit.

But it was the EU Referendum a year later that really propelled her into the public eye. Identified as the perfect “poster girl” for the Vote Leave campaign, as Patel herself puts it with trademark bluntness: “I’m a lifelong Brexiteer. I’m not someone who suddenly decided: ‘Oh, I quite fancy this because it might be in my political favour’. When the ERM [Exchange Rate Mechanism] came in my parents nearly lost everything. That’s why I’m a Leaver.”

Shrewdly backing Theresa May over Andrea Leadsom to replace Cameron following the Brexit vote, she was rewarded with the job of Secretary of State for the now defunct Department for International Development. But she was forced to resign after 16 months in the post following a furore over a trip to Israel and subsequent meetings with Israelis in Westminster and New York which she had failed to disclose to the prime minister.

After two years as a backbencher, and fierce critic of May’s Brexit deal (“I would have told the EU in particular to sod off with their excessive financial demands”), her loyalty to Boris Johnson in the 2019 Tory leadership race once again saw her rewarded – this time with the heavyweight post of Home Secretary.

Tasked with introducing a post-Brexit, “points-based” immigration system – as well as ending the life-threatening practice of thousands of migrants crossing the English Channel in the back of lorries or in dinghies, Patel has had her work cut out.

It also didn’t help when, during a seemingly fractious time with her own civil servants, she was accused of bullying by Sir Philip Rutnam, permanent secretary of the Home Office, who ended up leaving government with a £340,000 settlement and no liability accepted.

Her robust stance on crime and punishment has seen her described as a “modern day Norman Tebbit” – but it is her controversial Rwanda plan that has undoubtedly caused the most ire among her many detractors. Some have questioned how she – as the daughter of immigrants – can pursue such an aggressive policy.

“Well the difference is my parents came here legally,” she says. “I’m a human being as well, which is why I have always been very open and vocal about having safe and legal routes to our country.”

Insisting that the east African nation has distanced itself from its genocidal, corrupt past, she adds: “Rwanda as a country doesn’t want to be a recipient of aid, going around the West with a begging bowl. What does the Left do? They pivot to: ‘Oh isn’t it terrible, look at the past’. The past is appalling and it’s scarred the country but it’s scarred the country in the sense that they are rebuilding.

“If it was France, if we were sending people to Sweden, New York, Sydney, would they change their mind? That actually speaks of inbuilt prejudice and I would even go as far as to say, racism.”

With legal challenges to the Strasbourg ruling set to take weeks, if not months, the policy now appears to be in limbo, although Patel is determined to plough on: “Right now, our job is to find ways to overturn that.”

With no prospect of a holiday this summer, the Home Secretary is hoping to get to the cinema to watch the new Top Gun: Maverick film, as well as indulging her family’s love of Formula 1.

Revealing they managed to get to the theatre last weekend to see Back to the Future, the Musical, she adds: “We’re a Formula 1 household, governed by our son. When we’re together he loves going through Amazon Prime and Netflix. He likes James Bond and a lot of action films. My weekends are for my family when I can have time and that is very rare. Even trying to spend some time with my son to talk about school and homework and all of that – that doesn’t happen enough.”

And with that, Patel is hurriedly disembarking the train at Kings Cross. Yes, there are important affairs of state to deal with but Strasbourg will have to wait. For now, the Home Secretary’s most immediate priority is Freddie’s parents’ evening.