David Maddox: It’s Carry on Gaffing for the Teflon-coated Home Secretary

IT IS perhaps not surprising that odds on Theresa May being removed as Home Secretary fell yesterday as people started putting money on it at the bookmakers.

But despite the fiasco that the deportation of extremist Muslim cleric Abu Qatada has become, it is still a better bet that she will survive.

Mrs May has become one of those ministers who can gaffe spectacularly but carry on regardless.

At the last Conservative Party conference, she managed to get it so wrong about an illegal immigrant being allowed to stay because he had a pet cat that her Tory colleague, Justice Secretary Ken Clarke, criticised her in public.

She came under pressure over the handling of the London riots last summer, and the fiasco over the relaxation of passport controls when hundreds of thousands of people entered the country unchecked. But still she remains firmly planted in the Home Office.

Tory insiders say the primary reason for her survival is because she is a woman. Prime Minister David Cameron has struggled to win the female vote. It would look bad to lose or demote the most senior female in a Cabinet that is mostly made up of men.

But in the Qatada case there is some sympathy, too, for Mrs May. It seems she was badly advised on this occasion by officials, although that is an excuse she has successfully resorted to before.

Most of all, though, there is a state of “hyper-panic” in the government after a disastrous Budget and a series of bad headlines.

The Qatada deportation was meant to be the one good story the Conservatives had to offer.There is a feeling that Mrs May was rushed into it by Downing Street.