This was a week at Westminster that the Government would prefer to forget, though it is unlikely to be able to do so.
It began with the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, making an awkward statement about the “heart-breaking stories” of the Windrush generation and ended with Ministers frightened to hold a vote on leaving the customs union with the EU for fear that they would lose it.
The Home Secretary had already apologised to Caribbean migrants who had, through no fault of their own, been threatened with deportation, lost their jobs or been denied medical treatment, as they found themselves caught up in a Home Office crackdown on illegal migrants.
Now she was forced to come to the Commons to acknowledge the mistakes that the Home Office had made, to promise citizenship to those affected and to hold out the promise of compensation.
Shadow Home Secretary, Diane Abbott, said what had happened was “shameful” and amounted to “one of the biggest scandals in the administration of home affairs in a very long time”.
Ms Rudd faced the music again on Wednesday when she told the Home Affairs Select Committee that she deeply regretted not spotting the problem earlier of a generation of Britons wrongly targeted by immigration authorities and vowed to change the culture in her department. Ever loyal to the Prime Minister, she declined to accept that the “hostile environment” approach introduced by Theresa May when she was Home Secretary had anything to do with what had happened.
Thursday saw Home of Commons history when, for the first time ever, MPs debated a resolution submitted by a dozen Select Committee chairs urging the Government to negotiate to stay within a customs union with the EU. The resolution, moved by Labour’s Yvette Cooper, was supported in the chamber by a succession of rebel Conservative MPs, including Ken Clarke, Nicky Morgan, Anna Soubry, Dominic Grieve and Dr Sarah Wollaston.
A junior Treasury Minister, Mel Stride, said that the Government couldn’t support the motion because it would prevent the UK striking its own trade deals with the rest of the world. But when the moment to vote came, the Government sat on its hands and the resolution was passed unopposed.
Labour MP, Chris Leslie, suggested that, in line with the precedent of Opposition day debates, this meant the Government would be obliged to come to the House to respond within three months. The Speaker, John Bercow, in remarks that will not have endeared him to Ministers, said that he thought there was “a compelling logic” in what Mr Leslie had suggested.
In an otherwise divisive week within the chamber, MPs of all parties found an historic cause with which they could all agree outside in Parliament Square on Tuesday – the unveiling of the first ever statue in the square of a woman, the suffragist, Millicent Fawcett, who campaigned for 60 years for women’s right to vote. The first women were given the right to vote a century ago in 1918.