THE TELEGRAPH: Controvery [sic] and wrong decisions have plagued the Home Secretary.
It is a measure of the tribulation attached to the job of home secretary that so few of its holders have subsequently gone on to become prime minister. Jim Callaghan managed it, by appointment rather than election, and it took Winston Churchill the best part of 30 years and the threat of Nazi invasion to complete his ascent of the greasy pole. Prediction is an ugly business, but it can probably be safely said that the present incumbent of the post, Jacqui Smith, will not be troubling the scorers either.
Miss Smith has had a terrible week. First, she is widely and rightly condemned for engaging in an expenses-garnering operation that breaks no law, but certainly breaks its spirit. Then she manages to make quite the wrong decision about the admittance to Britain of the Dutch anti-Islamist Geert Wilders. It has rightly been pointed out that many other people with unsavoury points of view have been allowed into this country to peddle their ideas; not least Islamists who are profoundly anti-Christian. We are, or should be, a land that believes in freedom of speech. No one was expecting Miss Smith to ask Mr Wilders to have cocktails with her; but she should have allowed him in to say his piece, and to have the rest of us judge him on his own merits. Her action is a self-inflicted and entirely unnecessary blow to our tradition of liberty. Read on and comment >>> Telegraph View | Friday, February 13, 2009
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