SUNDAY 4 AUGUST 2019Editorials
Patel’s tough rhetoric has done
little to enlighten us
Priti Patel, the new home secretary, says in an interview with the Daily Mail that her comments about the
death penalty have been “constantly taken out of context”. The context being, presumably, the meeting of
the Conservative Association in Witham in Essex in 2006, when she was selected as its parliamentary
candidate.
Or that of BBC Question Time, after her election as an MP in 2010, a programme on which emphatic
statements tend to be clapped. As she was when she said: “I support the reintroduction of capital