Question: You mentioned the Home Office having lots of crises. Thinking about decision-making, if you could just talk us through an example of a crisis or an unexpected event that hit the department, and how you went about dealing with it as a minister?

Answer: I genuinely can’t give you ‘an’ instance because, you know, how many to choose from! What were some of our worst instances..? Queues at Heathrow in the run up to the Olympics was probably the most serious where… and it’s just a constant series of meetings, visits to Heathrow, negotiations with authorities at Heathrow, and working out – that was an interesting example because there was no high politics involved at all; what we had to do and what proved extremely difficult was to get competent people running the minute-by-minute operations on the ground. And it shows how what feels like ‘Surely that’s just a bit of admin’, in the end it got down to ministerial [effort] – the Prime Minister was getting involved as well, all the way up the line.

And actually, what mattered was … it’s almost something as simple as, what they had done was, when the queue started building up… and the rule of any airport is that once a queue is built up, you take hours to get it back, so you just have to stop them building again first.

What they used to do was send a tannoy message into the back room where they were all having coffee, saying ‘Please will someone come out, we need to fill up a few more benches’, and everyone just ignored it. If the manager went in and said ‘You, you and you, go sit on benches 10 to 15’, then you’ve solved it – it was as simple as that.

This should not have to entail ministerial intervention, but you discover it’s actually that kind of thing of sending a senior official who comes up and says ‘This is what you need to do’ and you say ‘Right, this is now what we’re going to do’, whatever unions say or things like that. And as a result of that plus other things where you would expect ministerial intervention, like decisions that we would pour more resources at it and there would be a lot of people sitting at the border and we would train people so they could act as border officials, then that bit of the Olympics passed entirely unnoticed, it was one of the triumphs.

We could welcome people at Heathrow and they all had a good time from the moment they got in this country, it was quite a significant. If it had gone wrong it would have been a significant national disaster, so it was that important. So that was a long-running emergency, but you know, there were forever short-term emergencies.

What they used to do was send a tannoy message into the back room where they were all having coffee