OPINION: Woke Home Office chief has championed Britain’s open border policy, says Steven Edginton

In July voters might have expected change, having handed power over to the Labour Party with a massive majority. Yet the same people who presided over, and are partly responsible for, the failures I have outlined remain in charge. They are, of course, the Civil Service.

The problem with the phrase the Civil Service or Whitehall or the Blob is that they are too vague. We must be specific. We must focus on who is responsible for this mess.

Therefore in this series of articles, I have chosen three senior civil servants to shine a light on. I want to show you who runs our government, and what their priorities are.

The most senior civil servant in the Home Office, the department responsible for the police and immigration, is Sir Matthew Rycroft.

Rycroft is a career diplomat. He served as a private secretary to Tony Blair, and has decades of experience in foreign affairs, including serving as Ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina and as Permanent Representative to the UN. Then in 2018 he was appointed Permanent Secretary to the Department for International Development, and in 2020 came to the Home Office.

Sir Matthew’s career was, until 2020, entirely focused on foreign affairs. In an interview with Civil Service World in March 2023, Rycroft stated that he still sees himself “as a diplomat who happens to be at the Home Office for the moment.”

The mandarin, who has more experience of Bosnian diplomacy than he does in policing or migration, has overseen the Home Office at its worst; Record illegal and legal migration, two-tier policing, crime waves, terror attacks (including the murder of Sir David Amess) and increasing societal dysfunction. It was under his watch that the Home Office repeatedly failed in its duty to protect the British public from Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai (his department failed to conduct proper background checks which would have revealed Abdulrahimzai murdered two people in Serbia before coming to the UK), an illegal migrant who killed the young British man Thomas Roberts.

Rycroft serves as the Home Office’s Race, Faith and Belief Champion.

A diversity Champion is a voluntary position hundreds (likely thousands) of Civil Servants hold to officially “champion” their causes, whether it is on race or religion or gender.

This means he spends time meeting civil servants about their religion (for example he attended an internal Ramadan event in March) or their beliefs (he once met civil servants in an official meeting to talk about Transgender issues), and discussing race. He wrote a foreword to a Home Office Race Action Plan which pushed Critical Race Theory on civil servants.

Evidence suggests the permanent secretary had a fractious relationship with the most hardline Home Secretary in recent years, Suella Braverman. Earlier this year she told GB News that she attempted to sack Rycroft, but was blocked by Rishi Sunak.

Under his watch the Home Office has promoted increasingly progressive ideas. Last year The Telegraph revealed Border Force officers are allowed to wear rainbow epaulettes, ‘non-binary’ Home Office civil servants are given two security passes so they can change their gender daily depending on how they identify, and staff have held a series of events on Black History Month in which people have openly supported BLM.

Radical racial ideas have been pushed by senior civil servants in various departmental meetings, including one senior mandarin claiming she had to work “ten times harder” than her white colleagues.

In November 2023, Lee Anderson took on Rycroft during a Home Affairs Select Committee session when he asked about the number of illegal immigrant deportations. Anderson called his inability to provide a response "staggering." The committee's Chair, Labour MP Dame Diana Johnson, expressed her own surprise, asking: "Do we have any figures on anything?"

In February of that year, he sent an email to staff outlining the department's mission: to "expand global talent visa routes," support victims of the Windrush scandal, and combat violence against women. In a year of record channel crossings and net migration, his failure to mention cutting immigration as a departmental mission was telling.

Just this month he was asked by civil servants about the Home Office’s shocking lack of data on migrant crime. He refused to answer.

After the recent anti-immigration riots and protests he wrote an email to Home Office civil servants saying: “The last few weeks have shown the Home Office at its best.” This statement, which officials claimed was merely a senior figure praising hard-working staff, nevertheless came amid a summer of chaos, with Channel border crossings out of control, people locked up for clumsy social media posts and two-tier policing.

However, the most shocking moment of Rycroft’s Home Office career came in 2021. The career diplomat hosted a Zoom call entitled: "Lunch with Civil Service Race Networks and Matthew Rycroft, race champion". He was asked how civil servants can stand up to ministers who are critical of diversity (i.e. DEI ideology), and he replied: "On some issues we should accept that direction – they are our democratically-elected leaders after all – but on others I think it's for us actually within the civil service to be stewards and to think about our own role in terms of the leadership of the organisation of the civil service which obviously takes account of ministerial views but doesn’t have to follow them slavishly on every particular issue.”

“Stewards”, “doesn’t have to follow them slavishly on every issue” - these statements alone should have been enough for Sir Matthew to have been fired on the spot.

Instead, in 2023 he was given a £30,000 bonus (including £10,000 for his job performance). While you, the British taxpayer, funds his pension, salary and bonuses to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds, illegal immigrants continue to flood into Britain and the Home Office remains a dysfunctional mess.