It’s difficult to recall any minister in recent years, let alone a Home Secretary, who has been lauded with such praise for command of their brief as Shabana Mahmood over the past week. Even those who are far from convinced that her plans to reform the asylum system will do the job intended are mostly fulsome in their regard for her.

As Keynes once put it: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’

But if there is one nagging doubt, it is that Mahmood appears to have swung dramatically from her earlier stance in opposition as an identikit Labour politician – when she embraced most of the usual left causes and demonstrated none of the independence of mind which now seems to be one of her most compelling traits.

In 2014, for example, she was part of a protest at a bra

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