Is Theresa May's Revelation A Ploy?
Updated: 1:27pm UK, Sunday 28 July 2013
By Jon Craig, Chief Political Correspondent
Did Theresa May decide to reveal that she has Type 1 diabetes and needs daily injections because she knew a committee of MPs was due to reveal a deep malaise in migration statistics?
Was the timing of her candid interview about her illness and her weight loss an attempt to deflect attention from the harsh criticism of the immigration figures by the Public Administration Select Committee of MPs?
Or is that a conspiracy theory too far? No doubt the Home Secretary would say so quite emphatically.
Mrs May has always attracted a lot of jealousy from male colleagues as she has risen to near the top in the Conservative Party.
Many resented her "nasty party" jibe when she was party chairman and there were plenty willing her to fail when David Cameron appointed her Home Secretary in 2010.
I recall senior frontbenchers joking at a Tory conference a few years back: "Theresa May, or maybe not. She used to be indecisive, but now she's not so sure."
But since 2010 she has proved to be a steely, unflappable, safe pair of hands at the notoriously perilous Home Office and those Tory MPs who used to mock her are silent now.
Since her adept handling of the Abu Qatada debacle ended successfully with his deportation three weeks ago, she has reinforced her position as a front-runner to become the next Tory leader.
And the latest whispering about her among colleagues was that her weight loss in recent months was a deliberate makeover as part of a leadership bid.
Not so, she has declared in the Mail On Sunday, though she confirms she has lost almost two stone.
She was diagnosed last November and at the moment she needs two injections a day, either in the stomach or the thigh, which can't be any fun.
Leadership bid?
"This was not some Machiavellian plan because there is no leadership bid," she insists.
Not yet, certainly. But one day, I predict, assuming her health is robust enough to allow her to "get on with it", as she puts it.
There will be sympathy for her, even from her detractors and political opponents.
Her disclosure proves that politicians are human, like the rest of us, and not as indestructible as they would sometimes have us believe.
So why didn't she reveal the illness earlier?
I suspect she wanted to get the Abu Qatada mess sorted out first.
Better to reveal her illness when her political stock is high, which it certainly is now - and which makes the immigration statistics fiasco even more frustrating and embarrassing for the Home Secretary.
As Bernard Jenkin, chairman of the Public Administration Committee, rightly says: "Most people would be utterly astonished to learn that there is no attempt to count people as they enter or leave the UK."
I was struck by the comment of Westminster City Council leader Philippa Roe, who gave evidence to the committee and said: "Disney World has better technology to keep track of its visitors than we as a country do."
Labour claims the select committee's report casts into doubt the Home Secretary's claims to have cut net migration.
She would dispute that - as she would the suggestion that the timing of her announcement about her illness had anything to do with the inevitable row over migration figures.
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