JAN MOIR: Why is it OK to demean Priti Patel just because she's a Tory? At least she has vowed to get tough on terrorism and tame the Extinction Rebellion warriors
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/arti ... -Tory.html
Priti Patel has been Home Secretary for six months, almost to the day.
She seems to be tough and demanding, which is exactly what we want — well, it is certainly exactly what I want — from the person who wields the big stick in one of the great offices of State at this perilous juncture in our history.
She has announced 20,000 more police officers in her war against crime, she has been outspoken about terrorism and she has agreed that it was wrong for the police to stand by and do nothing when Extinction Rebellion protesters in Cambridge barricaded roads in the city and dug up the Trinity College lawns. More of this, please. Much, much more.
Just because these particular protesters — and others like them — are convinced of the moral superiority of their argument doesn’t mean that they should be allowed to impede law-abiding citizens from going about their daily business.
Or be left unhampered to commit criminal damage under the very nose of Plod.
How did we get to a point where they could? Thank goodness we seem to have a Home Secretary who wants to stop the rot at last.
Ms Patel has also shown her mettle by demanding to see a Home Office report into Asian grooming gangs, although the mandarins are so far resisting. This is another moral outrage.
It should not be within the power of the Civil Service to block access to such an important document.
Although I am sure we could all hazard a guess as to the basis of their reluctance — cultural sensitivities, of course. Meanwhile, the poor girls who suffered at the hands of these brutes have been failed yet again.
My point is that Priti Patel is to be commended for her determination to rock the boat; to reintroduce rigour and authority to a public realm currently fractured thanks to moral weakness and corroded by fashionable Lefty relativism.
Today, tragically, it is not the crime that has been committed but who commits that crime which is deemed to be all-important. Surely this has to end before the very concept of justice becomes diluted by doctrine?
Previous Home Secretaries, such as Sajid Javid, never showed much of an appetite for the fight.
Amber Rudd may have had good intentions, but she was vaporised by her officials for daring to criticise them.
Patel is the victim of vicious briefing — MI5 don’t trust her, she’s a witch who tried to sack someone on Christmas Eve!
But she is in there; focused, determined and demanding of the bloated, entitled bureaucracy she has inherited — one that has had its own way for far too long.
Yet, far from being admired for her rigour, she has been pilloried and smeared. For her troubles, she has been labelled bossy, a bully, a madam.
This from her enemies within and without — and also by Left-wing newspapers sticking the boot in.
Honestly, I could hardly believe my eyes when I read their reports. A bully? That terrible insult that confers instant condemnation today for encroaching upon the mental health of others. Straight in the bin for you, Miss Bully Boots.
And for years we have been told that it is unforgivably sexist to call successful women ‘bossy’ or ‘bitchy’ — for aren’t they merely showing the kind of persistence and resolve that is so admired in successful men?
Yet these cultural niceties never apply to Patel, who is constantly depicted as a scheming intruder who doesn’t understand the world she now inhabits. For her, there is no clemency. Absolutely none.
On his BBC show in September, even Andrew Marr accused Patel of smirking during a discussion about the impact of a no-deal Brexit.
‘I can’t see why you are laughing,’ he huffed, even though she was doing nothing of the sort.
Hard to imagine Marr deploying such impertinence if he were interviewing, say, Diane Abbott. (Who certainly might have been smirking aplenty.)
Yet the precise and stringent conventions about how to treat women and people of colour vanish when it comes to Priti, who seems to have an open-season target on her back. Why?
Because she is from the political Right. One news website has even accused her of being ‘used as a pawn in white supremacy’, which strips the Home Secretary of her intelligence and authority, reducing her to nothing more than her colour, which is perhaps the most racist thing ever. How insulting.
Meanwhile many commentators — including myself — have been wrongfully accused of racism for airing the slightest peep of criticism about the Duchess of Sussex and her extravagant Soho House ways.
However, different rules apply in this case. You can say anything you want about Priti Patel, for whom none of the safeguards of political correctness apply. She’s a Tory — so it doesn’t count!
62.5 %
25 %
12.5 %
