Maybe Mahmood can save the Labour party after all

The home secretary has sent three migrants back to France. It could yet be a turning point (PA)

- JOHN RENTOUL

The past week was when Shabana Mahmood said she would start returning migrants to France.

Early in the week, anti-immigration voices were loud in derision when last-minute legal challenges meant that journalists went on a day out to Paris to report on empty seats in planes that had been booked by the Home Office for deportees. Then, on Thursday, the first migrant who had arrived by small boat was sent to France under the “one in, one out” pilot scheme. Did those anti-immigration voices cease their criticism and congratulate the home secretary on doing what she said she would do? They did not.

It is only one, they said. By the weekend, only three. And 1,072 migrants arrived by small boat on Friday, they pointed out.

Which is true, but overlooks the only thing that really matters. A politician did what she said she would do. Not just any politician but a home secretary, the one in charge of the Home Office, a department so dysfunctional that one of her predecessors, John Reid, gave up on it and split it in two.

And what she said she would do was to do with immigration. The one subject above all on which politicians have failed to keep their promises since the EU referendum, thereby pushing our democracy to the point where it is poised to elect a prime minister who is not of one of the two parties that have monopolised power for 100 years.

So, yes, it is just a pilot scheme, but it could be a turning point. Mahmood, her predecessor, Yvette Cooper, and Keir Starmer have not explained the scheme well, despite what I am about to say about Mahmood’s communication skills.