I have a particular dislike for Ms. Patel because she typifies this new breed of ultra dry, hard right, uncompromising Conservatives who believe that the solution to every problem is simply to batter it with a stick.
They are the kind of people who will never shut up in order to win the argument, who are so thick skinned that embarrassments, which would fry the conscience of a normal person, just bounce off their Teflon-coated armour.
They are the New Victorians, relentless in their moral righteousness, convinced of their rectitude to the bitterest end (but never for themselves) for whom self doubt is not so much a foreign land as the far side of Venus. All you ‘economically inactive’ people had better watch out even though we know that what she really means is the usual suspects of benefit cheats, single mums, the fake disabled and all the other n’er do wells that so hold back the nation in the fervid imaginings of the Tory hardliners.
No matter what the evidence to the contrary, the New Victorians are always correct and even when they are proven to be wrong, they simply flip and assert, with absolute conviction, that they had supported the prevailing evidence all along.
What I find especially horrid about the Home Secretary is her assertion that while many immigrants will (and in her eyes should) be denied the opportunity to contribute to British society, she and her parents would have always been okay because they were ‘refugees’. The smug way she asserts some kind of moral entitlement while simultaneously slamming doors on people not so dissimilar to herself is really quite unpleasant.