SO THE Home Secretary is finding it hard to keep his footing at the apex of the two shakiest edifices in government. For years, the Immigration and Nationality Directorate and the Prison and Probation Service have been slowly dissolving in the stew of their own staggering incompetence. Those on the inside can only shrug at the latest revelation that more than 1,000 convicted rapists, murderers, drug dealers and other nasties who should have been deported are roaming a land where they have no business to be, with no one knowing where most of them are. Those on the outside have suddenly had enough. This should be a turning point.

In the past few years the metropolitan elite have been too busy boasting about how little they pay their Filipina nannies and Hungarian cleaners to bother much about the violent gangs, paedophiles, traffickers and drug mules who have slipped in alongside. Now they are told that Wormwood Scrubs is occupied by 85 nationalities speaking 24 languages, and that almost 13 per cent of those in detention are foreign, it will be harder to cast the white working classes so exclusively as the thugs and xenophobes. The failure to deport foreign criminals is not just a “breakdown in communications”, as Charles Clarke has claimed. It is also a consequence of the deliberate policy of encouraging immigration on an unprecedented scale, a policy that has never been put to the electorate. Once again the Government is lamenting that it has lost control of the paperwork, and is promising to do better. But when you’ve lost control of the borders, the paperwork is pretty meaningless.

Since the abolition of embarkation controls in 1988, there has been no effective record of who comes in and out of Britain. Our visa offices overseas, as one despairing immigration officer with 40 years’ experience told me recently, “are instructed to issue visas to all and sundry with the most cursory of interviews or none at all”. A criminal record was no bar to entry for the Latvian rapist who had served ten years at home before killing a schoolgirl in Greenford, West London last year. Nor to the Pole who raped a woman in Llanelli after serving nine years in Poland.

Twenty years ago the courts would routinely deport serious offenders, an immigration judge told me. Now they can only recommend deportation, towards the end of a sentence, and it is not automatic even for drug offences. Government does not know how many people are eventually kicked out. And under the 1951 Refugee Convention criminals still have a right to claim asylum even after conviction. An offender can appeal against a recommendation, and then against the deportation order, all at public expense. Why do we lack the courage to circumvent the convention by offering criminals the chance to halve their sentence if they agree to leave the country? Or do we assume that they will just return under a false identity?

Last year a deportation order was made against a Bangladeshi imam who is married to a Bristol woman, although he was found not guilty of smacking two children. Yet Courtney Burry, who served four years for gross indecency with a nine-year-old girl, has successfully claimed that he cannot return to Jamaica because of the stigma there about sex offenders. Indrit Krasniqi, a Kosovan in care in Britain from his arrival aged 13, should have left the country by the time he helped to murder the teenager Mary-Ann Leneghan. But he is still here.

The system is surreal. The Home Office last year concluded an agreement to return terrorist suspects to Algeria. But now, I am told, it is to issue those suspects with phone cards bearing the number of the British Embassy in Algiers. This is so that the poor dears can call for help from the British taxpayer if their own government dares to put on the thumbscrews. Where is the logic, where is the fairness, when we are so manifestly failing to protect our own citizens?

The police long ceased to rely on the system. At one point they proposed to build a prison in Kingston, Jamaica, to hold all the drug runners convicted in Britain who would have overwhelmed the island’s jails. A quarter of all foreign women in British jails are Jamaican, many of them drug mules. Since this would have created a disastrous precedent for the British taxpayer — not quite the export market for construction contracts the experts had envisaged — they installed scanners at Kingston airport and had some success. But drugs are now coming from Nigeria instead. Prostitution has shifted from Eastern European sources to Balkan ones. The crime just keeps shifting.

Downing Street has said that it is “unreasonable to expect ministers to know what is going on in every nook and cranny of their department”. So it is. I would not expect Mr Clarke to know that prison officers are leaving Feltham Young Offender Institution to work as baggage handlers at Heathrow, on better pay. Nor even that half the IND’s staff now advise, pay or recruit the other half. But he should have searched every nook and cranny for the missing convicts when questions were first asked eight months ago. He should have done something about the “instutitional blindspot” that Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons highlighted three years ago. He should not have allowed the services to “lose” a further 288 ex-prisoners since July. If it was clear to him that an unfettered immigration policy was posing a threat to the public, he should have said so.

The experiment this Government has been so blithely conducting for eight years has created risks that are only now showing up on the political radar screen. It is not enough to sigh and blame mediocre management. The Home Office and the institutions that are rightly giving Mr Clarke vertigo must be shaken, shaken and shaken until they stop protecting criminals who should never even have been here, and start protecting us.

camilla.cavendish@thetimes.co.uk

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