Amber Rudd has resigned as Home Secretary, after contradictory accounts emerged of when she knew about deportation targets at the Home Office. Rudd told the Home Affairs Select Committee that the Home Office had no deportation targets, but subsequent leaks to the Guardian newspaper revealed inconsistencies in her story.
It marks a humiliating end to the frontbench career of a politician regularly touted for the highest office.
Rudd had been seen as the leader of the continuity Cameron faction within the parliamentary party, having joined the frontbench as George Osborne’s parliamentary private secretary and served as a government whip and a junior minister at the Department for Energy and Climate Change before being promoted to the Cabinet after David Cameron’s general election win in 2015.
Her exit leaves a vacancy not only at the Home Office but for the mantle of Cameroon standard-bearer at the next leadership election.