Why do Labour Home Office ministers stumble so badly when they attempt to deal with immigration? Because the party is still fundamentally uncomfortable with the whole issue

The serialisation of Gordon Brown's latest book, Wartime Courage, has gone largely unnoticed. But in the week running up to Remembrance Sunday, the Daily Telegraph ran extracts of the Prime Minister's latest tribute to individual heroism, which followed two previous volumes on celebrated men and women of courage and everyday heroes. The extracts suggest that the new book, due for publication in April of next year, is a surprisingly good read. Brown is plainly moved by the Second World War bomb disposal experts, secret service operatives and ordinary soldiers whose exploits he describes.

It is said that Gordon Brown became so obsessed with these stories of personal courage that senior members of the defence staff and the intelligence services would bring him new snippets of information, or be asked by Brown to open files to confirm facts on the people concerned. As the extracts show, the stories in Wartime Courage are peppered with references to these military and intelligence documents.

But where lie the roots of this obsession? I am told that Brown became fascinated by how people perform under fire and, in particular, how they kept their head when entering enemy territory.

I kept thinking of the book extracts when I watched Jacqui Smith under persistent Tory fire after her parliamentary statement this week on how much she knew about people working illegally in this country as security guards, and when she knew it. It made me wonder why Labour Home Office ministers fare so badly when entering the enemy territory represented by the immigration debate in this country.

One by one they have been shot down by David Davis, who simply waits for them to move into his sights on the immigration battlefield before picking them off. The first was Beverley Hughes, the immigration minister who resigned in April 2004 after she claimed not to have known about a visa scam involving fraudulent claims from eastern Europe. It later turned out that she had been warned a year previously. Her demise was followed, in December of the same year, by that of her mentor, David Blunkett, after he was linked to the speeding up of a visa for his lover's nanny. The episode also revealed systematic failings at the Immigration and Nationality Directorate at the Home Office.

Blunkett's successor, Charles Clarke, fared no better when, in May 2004, he was forced out after it was revealed that more than 1,000 foreign prisoners had been released without being deported. The final straw came when the New Statesman revealed that one of the offenders concerned went on to become a suspect in a high-profile terrorist case.

We are talking here about new Labour's crack troops, not fresh-faced new recruits, and yet in three-and-a-half long years they have been shown to be woefully ill-equipped and poorly trained to deal with a firmly entrenched enemy, sure of its ground. So why is it that Labour politicians stumble so haplessly when they attempt to deal with this issue?

I believe there are three main reasons. The first is that the department responsible for dealing with immigration at the Home Office remains one of the most dysfunctional in the whole of Whitehall. John Reid knew this when he split the Home Office in two, but the restructuring, while it may have highlighted the problem, has not yet brought the reform necessary to solve it. A second and connected issue is the disloyalty of immigration officials to the government. David Blunkett's troubles began when an ideologically-driven mole began leaking information. Ministers believe a similar process was at work in the recent leaks to the Daily Mail of emails showing how early Jacqui Smith was made aware of the problem over security guards. They are convinced that they went to the Tory party first, and I have certainly heard senior Tories boast that they have had Home Office officials falling over themselves to provide them with information.

Distasteful work

But third and most importantly, Labour ministers still feel deeply uncomfortable with the immigration issue and, in many cases, quite rightly so. No Labour politician goes into parliament because of a burning desire to deport asylum-seekers or kick illegal workers out of their jobs. This is distasteful work, and despite ten years of tough-talking rhetoric I don't believe even David Blunkett, Labour's most authoritarian home secretary, was happy dealing with immigration policy. For this reason alone, Labour will always be outflanked by a party which feels passionately about it.

Jacqui Smith, therefore, has good reason to be concerned. There is a growing frustration within the Labour government that no real progress has been made at the Home Office since Gordon Brown became Prime Minister. Although new initiatives have been launched by Ed Balls at the Department for Children, Schools and Welfare, for example, and by Peter Hain at the Department for Work and Pensions, Smith has been hamstrung by a department that still seems, in the words of her predecessor, "not fit for purpose". At the time of writing, Smith herself is not being held responsible and her stock remains high because of her handling of the failed terrorist attacks in June. Her offence at this point is unclear. She certainly held back information from the public, but it isn't clear whether she did so to stop illegal immigrants going on the run, or to bury bad news. Either way, one more leak of a misjudged email and she could yet find herself in no-man's-land, just another victim of David Davis's sniper fire.

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