Mr Reid is beginning to give his answers and has a busy few days. Senior Home Office staff have known since he arrived that many of their jobs were at risk, but few would have foreseen quite how many. A quarter of directors are to be moved, 250 senior staff will be assessed amid fears that they are not up to their job, and 3,300 jobs are to be moved from the centre to the front line. The numbers are impressive, suggesting that Mr Reid is prepared to grapple with the scale of the problem, but on their own they mean little. Will the price of failure be redundancy or a similar salary on a different floor?

His response to the shambles that is the Immigration and Nationality Directorate is similarly moot. Creating a semi-independent agency, like the Identity and Passport Service and the Prison Service, has potential merit. Ministers will set policy but will be less able to micromanage. Managers will be more free to operate without having to look over their shoulder. Both developments should improve the department’s performance, as long as the policy is sound.

The difficulties will occur when politics intrudes and scandals hit the headlines. If, for instance, the Home Office has in future to admit that it has let out thousands of foreign criminals without considering them for deportation, what will the public make of a minister who refuses to take responsibility, instead blaming his arm’s- length managers? This cannot be a mechanism for letting ministers off the hook. It will only be credible if there are proper channels of accountability.

In both cases, what matters is not so much the numbers of civil servants moved from this role to that, or the structure within which they work, but the quality of the management and its ability to run efficient operations. Mr Reid’s moves are in the right direction, but how he proposes to attract talent to the top jobs is the key.

Following the maxim that while you have the audience’s attention, you might as well keep going, Mr Reid has secured 8,000 extra prison places, and today will outline tougher sentencing guidelines. The extra places are critical but lamentably late. The Government has for years allowed prison capacity to dictate sentencing policy rather than the other way round. Mr Reid’s efforts to redress that cannot disguise that whatever he does in the medium term, he faces a short term prisons crisis of his predecessors’ making.

Mr Reid is good at talking tough. He is also good at talking jargon, promising “enhanced leadership and delivery skills” and a “more dynamic frontline”. And he knows his way around a news management plan. But after eight Cabinet jobs in as many years, what is not yet clear is whether he can stick around long enough to deliver results.