George Orwell would have been proud. As Beverley Hughes, the disgraced minister for citizenship and immigration, stood up in the Commons to announce her resignation on Thursday, immigration officials in Sheffield were cracking down. They had a suspicious character to investigate and there was to be no rubber-stamping.

He had bent the rules. He had a colourful background. Perhaps he had committed an offence. Should he be allowed to stay or should he be ejected? The man in question was Steve Moxon, one of their own caseworkers. His transgression: to have spoken out about the shambles in Britain’s immigration service that was letting thousands of people into the country with few or no checks.

Moxon had been suspended from his job for leaking damning details to The Sunday Times. Now he was being subjected to an interview under disciplinary procedures. It was a lot more searching than any investigation endured by his immigration applicants: as Moxon had revealed, most of them were being waved through without even the most scant of vetting.

“Rather than managing migration, the government has simply tried to hide the actual figures,” Moxon told The Sunday Times four weeks ago. “In doing so it has actually compounded the mess.”

The government had initially scorned the allegations. First it accused The Sunday Times of making them up. When that did not work, it tried to smear Moxon. He was a maverick with a racist agenda, the spin implied. Any lax controls in the Sheffield office were a local aberration. The system was fine.

The whitewash failed. Other leaks — provided by ordinary citizens outraged by Moxon’s treatment — flooded in. They spoke of mafia rings and crooked lawyers not acted against, sham marriages and bogus students ignored, ministers misleading parliament. The catalogue of corner- cutting went far beyond the little bit of local difficulty claimed by the government.

So for Moxon there was more than one consolation when he faced his grilling last Thursday: not only was Hughes out of a job but the lid had also been blown off the shambles that is Britain’s immigration system.

“They must be jumping up and down with joy,” Moxon said of his colleagues in Sheffield after Hughes resigned. “They just can’t stand her. They are absolutely livid with the way she has treated them.”

This weekend further leaks suggest even more serious fiddling of the system at ministerial level. According to several sources in the immigration service and an internal memo, the Home Office condoned a policy of not pursuing illegal immigrants who were already working in Britain for fear that, if caught, they would simply claim asylum. David Blunkett, the home secretary, has staked his reputation on reducing the number of asylum claims.

It is true, as Blunkett points out, that most migrants are genuine and skilled workers. But it is now clear that thousands of people, including possible terrorists, have been allowed to enter and stay in Britain without proper checks. It is little wonder then that Blunkett, the man with ultimate responsibility for immigration, said Hughes’s resignation marked the “worst personal day” of his career. His own job is now on the line.

IN 1997, the year when Labour came to power, net migration into Britain was a little under 50,000. Within 12 months it had nearly tripled to 140,000. The latest available figures show that 153,000 more people arrived than left the country in 2002 — and that does not include the unknown number of illegal migrants.

This extraordinary surge was a political time bomb that ticked slowly. When William Hague, then the Conservative leader, attempted to make an issue of it in the 2001 election, he was cast as a xenophobe and Labour slapped him down.

If voters were not overly concerned then, 9/11 and the war on terror have changed the context of the debate. Faced with the threat of terrorists crossing into Britain to bomb shopping centres, trains and airports, immigration and the government’s ability to control it has become a key election issue - and Labour’s record is not good.

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