“You never know,” Mike Tapp said cheerily, “we might get lucky and get a load of Albanian gangsters.” We were on board the HMC Seeker, a 42m Border Force cutter, about to search the Solent – the strait between the Isle of Wight and mainland Britain – for drug smugglers. It was a sunny day and the migration minister, wearing a life jacket over a Peregrine waxed coat, was having a fantastic time.
The crew picked up Tapp, a BBC crew and me at Portsmouth and showed us around the ship. The MP said he’d sailed before, but never on a ship like this. The captain talked him through some of the controls. Tapp leaned back, smiled, and said to me: “Write: he learned very quickly.” He started pretending to press buttons. “We’re in charge, guys. Where shall we go?”
Tapp, 40, a former soldier, is one of Labour’s most hawkish MPs on borders and immigration. He was appointed the under-secretary for migration and citizenship in the September reshuffle in which Shabana Mahmood was made Home Secretary. In the 2024 election, Tapp won the seat of Dover and Deal, on the eastern tip of Kent, which had been held by the Conservative Party for 14 years. Mahmood has promised to tighten the rules around migrants’ right to remain in the UK: they will have to prove they are contributing to society, for example showing willingness to volunteer in their communities. This has won her glowing coverage in the Spectator. But Tapp’s rhetoric is even more hard line than his boss’s. He has accused migrants of “shopping around for asylum”, and boasted of the government’s “record deportations”.
Yet Tapp is not exactly a serious figure. He is frequently an object of derision online for the way he plasters the Union Jack all over his social media. On 10 October he was ridiculed for posting a picture of his “full English” breakfast on X, with the caption “British values” and some British flag emojis. “We are months away from Labour ministers live-streaming themselves having sex with the Union Jack,” replied the left-wing commentator Owen Jones. Such mockery bounces off Tapp.
It was time to find some drugs. We made our way down to a black rib – a smaller, faster vessel that was better for chasing smugglers. In a Border Force helmet and jacket, Tapp enthusiastically described how officials had seized a record amount of cocaine this summer: 15.6 tonnes, worth more than £1bn, most of it having come from South America. An officer told us they had caught a vessel containing ten smugglers a few weeks before. You can normally tell the purpose of a vessel before you approach a boat, the officer said: drug smugglers don’t tend to wear life jackets.
We were lowered into the water and the captain let Tapp take the wheel. The minister looked delighted. “Do you feel safe?” he asked me. The boat sped up.
It was a clear afternoon, and most people on the Solent were leisurely fishing. Tapp waved at them. He seemed relaxed at the wheel. We passed a man in a yellow sunhat who was smoking weed on his boat deck. “It’s like going on a funfair!” said Tapp. “People pay good money to do this.” We weren’t that far off an Ed Davey election stunt.
We approached the east coast of the Isle of Wight, on which there was a long stretch of multicoloured huts on an empty beach. No smugglers today – it was time to return to the Seeker. Tapp spun the boat around, racing us back to the edge of England, along sloping fields and bright cliffs.
We got off the boat, hands numb. “I loved the Caribbean bloke clearly having a spliff,” said Tapp. “We could have arrested him – made our haul that spliff.” A BBC journalist who had been on the rib looked worried. “It was a bit scary when the minister was driving,” she said.
I met Tapp again a few days later at the Home Office with his dog, Scooby, a huge ten-year-old Rhodesian Ridgeback, who is allowed in the department on weekends. I wanted to know if, behind Tapp’s jokes and bombast, there was a serious politician.
“Do you like the flags?” Tapp asked me as we entered his office. There were four Union Jacks in the room: a large one next to a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, a smaller one on a stick on his desk and two velcroed to Scooby’s harness. Tapp owns about ten Union Jacks in total – socks, ties, clips, “everything really. Lots of flags.” Recently, on holiday in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, he spent £80 on a big vintage flag for his living-room wall. “It was stupid,” he said. “My dad was, like, ‘Why are you spending that much on a flag?’”
He’s largely in favour of people raising Union Jacks in towns and villages. “I like seeing the flag, but some of them are the wrong way and attached with sort of dodgy zip ties. I think painting them on a roundabout is probably a bit weird.” he said. “I like it, but you’ve got to do it properly.” Scooby settled on the sofa, looking regal.
Tapp said his patriotic posts on social media are tongue-in-cheek. “Obviously there’s this real seriousness to British values, right? And what we stand for as a nation. But you can also have a bit of fun with it, because we’re British, and that’s what we do. We take the piss out of ourselves… A strong sense of humour is very much a British value.”
Tapp grew up in Hitchin, Hertfordshire (he was annoyed when I raised the subject of unfounded online rumours that claim he was born in South Africa). His mother was a care worker and his father was a police officer. Tapp went to a local state school and played rugby until he damaged a ligament in his knee. He had planned to join the military, but enrolled at Leeds Metropolitan University to study history and politics first. But after six months of “lots of drinking, too much partying”, he realised he’d rather go straight into the army.
“I basically jumped on the train, went to the Luton careers office and signed up.” The army rejected him because of his knee injury. “I’d already packed in university, so I thought, ‘That’s not good.’” He appealed the decision, and spent a year working in a pub and as a window cleaner. “Didn’t see anything through people’s windows, which is a shame.” The year of not knowing whether the army would take him was very stressful. “I remember when I got the information [granting admission]. I was in Wales hiking, and my mum called me up,” he said. “It was just the best feeling in the world.”
Recruits would be made to spend hours ironing, and then be dragged out to crawl in the mud, and then return and iron again: “Just lots of testing your character, to see who’s going to break and get angry.” Tapp only broke once, when he lost his key to his locker and had to stand around waiting in muddy clothes. “You get humiliated when that happens. There’s a sort of ceremony around the bolt cutters for the idiot that’s lost his key.”
He went into the Intelligence Corps and did one operational tour in Iraq and two in Afghanistan. Iraq was horrible, he told me. He and his team were confined to their Basra base, sitting ducks while missiles struck. The first time they were fired on, Tapp was at a Subway, getting sandwiches for his colleagues. “As a soldier, you’re trained to fight, you’re trained to be in control of what’s happening, but you have no control over that, and there’s nothing you can do. Your skill as a soldier has no impact on whether you live or die,” he said, turning more serious. Tapp is not religious, but when he lay down waiting for the attack to be over he prayed. “When you’re getting 25 rounds and they are landing quite close, it’s bloody stressful.”
Tapp enjoyed his work as an analyst and operator in Afghanistan – much of which involved identifying the location of improvised explosive devices. (There are rumours on the internet that Tapp was a spy, which he denies. “People get silly with it, but I just ignore that.”) After Afghanistan, he joined the National Crime Agency, where he worked in a range of sectors from child protection to drugs to human trafficking. The worst thing he had to do, he told me, was search a girl’s room for evidence she’d been groomed by a paedophile. He moved to the Ministry of Defence to work in counter-terror – a similar job, but double the pay – for five years. “Then I’d made the decision that I wanted to give politics a pop, because I’m crazy.”
Tapp had been a member of the Labour Party when he was younger, but left during the Jeremy Corbyn years. “I’m a sensible person – my view of the country is that we don’t need or want extremes on the left or the right.” He rejoined once Keir Starmer became leader, then ran twice in unwinnable council seats – but did better than expected. Something about his military zeal seemed to appeal to voters. When Tapp was younger, he’d gone on holiday in Deal, Kent, and this was one of the reasons he applied to be its Labour parliamentary candidate. He wasn’t immediately accepted into the fold. “Labour Party members,” he began delicately, “can sometimes not be in the centre. But obviously I found people that were and they backed me.”
The former Dover MP, Natalie Elphicke, defected to Labour from the Conservatives two months before the 2024 general election, on the understanding that she wouldn’t be Labour’s candidate. Tapp describes his Dover and Deal seat as a bellwether. His majority is 7,559, but polling shows Reform comfortably ahead of Labour in the constituency.
Despite the hard-right party’s strength, Tapp still sees the UK as a fundamentally centrist country. “I think we’re quite socially conservative in a small-c way, but economically probably more soft left, which is now what Nigel Farage is trying to trick the country into thinking he is.”
Is Farage a racist? “Only he knows that,” Tapp said. “I would say that some of his policies will divide [and] bring a lot of uncertainty to hard-working, decent people who are in this country contributing,” he said, referencing Reform’s plan to scrap migrants’ indefinite leave to remain. “It lays the foundations for racism to thrive, pitches neighbour against neighbour, looking at people of a different colour skin with suspicion.” Reform voters, he reiterated, are decent people, let down by politics.
Tapp is also offended by Farage’s use of the Union Jack. “I think he uses it as a tool to divide. That’s not what the flag stands for. It does make me quite angry.”
Tapp insists that in its first year in power Labour has enacted policies that will make people’s lives better: reducing NHS lists, achieving economic growth and tackling illegal working. But it takes time for the impact of these changes to be felt: “You know how sluggish the political system is.” Tapp claimed he would happily spend nights in parliament in a cot bed to push things through. “Maybe it’s the military in me. I hate seeing things take this long.”
He is frustrated that the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill is still held up in the House of Lords. The Conservatives under Kemi Badenoch claim that leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) would help “stop the boats” coming over the Channel, arguing the ECHR imposes “significant constraints”on what the government can do. Tapp, though, opposes leaving the convention: “You’ve got to remember a lot of our [migrant] returns agreements use the ECHR. They’re underpinned by it.”
He recently met a couple of Albanian migrants who had been arrested for illegally entering the UK. “I told them very directly not to bother: ‘Don’t come back, because we are cracking down on that sort of illegal employment. So there’s nothing here for you.’ Hopefully they listened.” I tried to imagine this smiley man, who a few days before I had seen jabbing buttons on a ship and pretending he was the captain, sternly telling migrants to go home. It was unconvincing.
Critics call Tapp an opportunist who is exploiting the resurgence in nationalist sentiment. Some of his views may not sit comfortably with many of his colleagues in the Parliamentary Labour Party. This summer he criticised the government for its plans to recognise Palestine. He told me the world owes “a lot of respect” to Donald Trump over the ceasefire in Gaza. When asked if there was anything positive that could be said about recent Conservative prime ministers, he said that David Cameron’s politics were “pretty solid”, apart from triggering Brexit. Theresa May “probably would have been a good prime minister” in a different time. Rishi Sunak is a “decent bloke”. Tapp’s favourite Labour leader is Tony Blair.
When I asked him why he joined Labour instead of the Conservatives or Reform, he replied that Labour aligns most closely with the values instilled in him by the military. “You know: rules of engagement when you’re out on the ground, treating people with decency and respect… I really bloody well mean it.” His whole career – as with those of his parents – has been about service, he said. In that way, he is like Starmer. “You look at Starmer, he’s actually served the country as director of public prosecutions, and he means what he says.” The Prime Minister promoted Tapp into the government only a year after Tapp became an MP. For all of Tapp’s critics on the right, who see him as inauthentic and shallow, he clearly embodies something Starmer thinks he needs: a patriotism that he can’t articulate.
Since he got promoted to his ministerial position, Tapp dreams most nights of briefings. He wakes up at 6am every morning to walk Scooby. When the dog met Shabana Mahmood, he barked at her. Luckily, the Home Secretary took it well. After all, humour is a British value.
[Further reading: The fantasy of Trump’s “eternal peace”]
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This article appears in the 16 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Emperor