Quite right!: 'I was reported for bullying!' – inside the Home Office dysfunction

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🗓️ 29 October 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

Listeners on the Best of Spectator playlist can enjoy a section of the latest episode of Quite right! but for the full thing please seek out the Quite right! channel. Just search ‘Quite right!’ wherever you are listening now.

This week on Quite right!: the great Home Office meltdown. After a week of fiascos – from the accidental release of a convicted migrant to the collapse of the grooming gangs inquiry – Michael and Maddie ask: is the Home Office now beyond repair? Why is Britain’s most important department also its most dysfunctional? And what does it say about a civil service more obsessed with ‘listening circles’ and ‘wellbeing surveys’ than actually running the country?

Then to Westminster, where Jess Phillips faces fury over the grooming gangs inquiry. Are ministers diluting the investigation to avoid awkward truths about race and culture? Michael argues that empathy is no substitute for justice – and that Labour still can’t bring itself to confront the problem honestly.

Next, Maddie shares an extraordinary personal story of her mother’s nightmare tenant – thirty dogs, tens of thousands in damages, and zero help from the state – as she and Michael debate whether Britain’s social contract is breaking down, and if new housing laws will only make things worse.

Finally, the big news of the week: Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau’s hard-launch romance. But what do Justin Trudeau’s sartorial choices say about the state of politics and pop? And who would be their British equivalent?

Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Michael and I have a parish announcement to make. From next week, quite right, we'll be airing
0:04.5	two episodes a week with our usual episode on a Wednesday and a bonus question and answer
0:10.0	episode on a Friday morning. So we're inviting you, spectator subscribers, to submit urgent
0:15.8	questions, those that you've always wanted to ask us, such as, Maddie, what does Rod Little really like in the pub?
0:23.9	Michael, how on earth can you possibly hold your head up in public after 14 disastrous Tory years?
0:30.5	Whatever you'd like to ask, go to spectator.com.uk.uk forward slash quite right, And you can submit your question there. And then we'll
0:40.2	answer as many as we can next week. Hello and welcome to Quite Right. I'm Michael Gove,
0:51.8	editor of The Spectator. And I'm Madeleine Grant, assistant editor and
0:54.9	parliamentary sketchwriter at The Spectator. This week we'll be looking at the smoking ruin
0:59.6	that is the Home Office. And in the eternal battle between landlords and tenants, where should
1:05.0	power really lie? And we'll also be asking, in the wake of Justin Trudeau and Katie Perry coming out as a couple,
1:14.0	what does that tell us about politicians, pop and the relationship between the two?
1:22.5	Michael, it's been a pretty torrid week for the Home Office.
1:25.9	On Friday, we learnt of the deeply embarrassing
1:28.0	accidental release of Hadush Kabatu, the Ethiopian asylum seeker, who was convicted of
1:33.0	assaulting a schoolgirl in Epping and was somehow released into the population. This came just a few
1:39.4	days after the similarly humiliating report that an Iranian migrant who had been removed to France on the one-in-one-out pilot scheme had returned to Britain on a small boat.
1:49.3	And then there is the apparent collapse of the grooming gang's inquiry.
1:52.8	On Monday, Nigel Farage led a press conference alongside a survivor who denounced the whole process in absolute terms and said that Jess Phillips, the safeguarding
2:02.3	minister, had explicitly lied to her. I mean, it's fair to say it's been a pretty bad week
2:08.1	for a department which is very rare that the Home Office can be said to have had a good week.
2:12.3	It is the, in a hotly contested field, the most dysfunctional department in government. And of course,
	...

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