On 7 January 1983 The Guardian reported:

Into Mr Raison’s hot spot comes a minister who has travelled fast since joining the government. David Waddington is a barrister and businessman who found no difficulty in facing out Labour indignation at the rising unemployment figures when he served under Mr Tebbit at Employment. A tough and combative parliamentary operator he has clearly been given a flattering promotion.

It was kind of The Guardian to write in those terms, but I was arriving at the Home Office faced with a problem for which there was no solution. In December there had been a Tory backbench rebellion when new immigration rules, making it easier for foreign wives to gain admission to the country, had been thrown out by the House of Commons. The obvious course was to table new rules tightening up the admission criteria, but this had been made more or less impossible by a ruling of the European Court of Human Rights extending the right of a man to bring into the country a foreign wife. So there were difficulties ahead, but I was not fully aware of them when the next morning I arrived at the Home Office in good cheer and ready for action. The correct postal address of the building was 1 Petty France but Willie Whitelaw, the Secretary of State, had soon spotted that to call it that would make us all a laughing stock so it was decided to pretend that it was round the corner and to call it 50 Queen Anne’s Gate. And there at the door of 50 Queen Anne’s Gate I was greeted by Sir Brian Cubbon, the Permanent Secretary, and taken up to see the Secretary of State. Willie, sprawled on a sofa and in an expansive mood, told me what my job was and told me to get on with it.

The next day, at the routine morning meeting, I met my fellow ministers – Paddy Mayhew, the other Minister of State, Rodney Elton, under-secretary in the Lords, and David Mellor, a new under-secretary in the Commons. My place at the table was directly opposite Willie but the view was somewhat obstructed by two ornamental brass prison gates and a clutch of truncheons.

My private secretary and assistant private secretary were both hard workers dealing with the enormous number of immigration cases finding their way to my office. So many indeed were there that the files had to be wheeled in on hospital-style trollies, hundreds at a time. Cases found their way to the minister’s office as a result of what were known as MPs’ representations. Broadly speaking, the minister was not troubled with a case unless an MP had come on the scene at the request of one of his constituents. If an MP had become interested, the case was not dealt with by an official but looked into by the minister personally who then had to write to the MP telling him of his ruling.

A typical case arose in this way. A Pakistani living in Bradford would sponsor a visit to England by some friend or relative. When the friend or relative arrived at Heathrow the Immigration Service had to decide whether he or she was a genuine visitor intending to return home after a short stay in Britain or a would-be immigrant determined to get into Britain and stay in Britain. If the immigration officer, having questioned the person about his or her background and intentions, determined he or she was not a genuine visitor he would refuse entry. The relative would then go to his or her MP and the MP would ring up Heathrow or the Home Office and demand that the person should not be removed back to Pakistan until the MP had made representations on the person’s behalf. The representations were considered by officials who drafted a letter of response for signature by the minister. The minister considered the case and either signed the letter which had been offered up to him or rejected official advice and drafted a different response. All this took many weeks if not months. Sometimes the MP would not take ‘no’ for an answer and either demanded a meeting so that he could argue the case in person or bombarded the minister with letters raising new points and daring the minister to remove the passenger before he had answered all these points in minute detail.

This meant that a person who was clearly not entitled to enter the country was often able to stay for months, and many tried to use the time they had won to make themselves irremovable. Marriage was one obvious method. Another was to get a job and then get a body like the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) to argue that in a matter of months he had made himself entirely indispensable either to the British economy or the race relations industry or both.

There were then all the cases in which people, having been given permission to enter as visitors or having been refused entry as visitors but granted temporary admission, disappeared into the undergrowth. Years later a man would be picked up by the police and then you could be sure it would be argued on his behalf that although he had cheated and lied to get into the country, and had then, by disappearing, cost the taxpayer a mountain of money, he should be allowed to make his home here.

There was then the problem of husbands and wives. Should men settled here be able to import wives? Should wives settled here be able to import husbands? In principle, yes. I would consider it an appalling interference with my daughter’s rights if she was prevented from coming back to England to live here with her Australian husband. But she was born here. She is British. Should someone who is not British have the same rights? And surely, whatever the answer to that question, a person settled here should not be able to use marriage as a mere device to get someone into the country.

We were constantly told that we had to respect the institution of the arranged marriage. If a man wanted to bring a woman into the country for marriage he should be allowed to do so, even if he had never clapped eyes on her, even if he had been paid a substantial sum of money to marry her and thus facilitate her entry. But when it came to an application by an Indian or Pakistani girl in England to bring in an Indian or Pakistani boy and we argued that the custom of the arranged marriage required the woman to go and live in the man’s home not the man to travel half way across the world to come and live with the woman, a completely different set of arguments were paraded. How could the woman, having lived in England for some years, be expected to face the rigours of the Indian climate?

The self-proclaimed experts on these matters, and there were many, insisted that we were grappling with a non-problem. The number of people in Britain whose origins lay in the Indian subcontinent was already very large. In a few years’ time boys and girls who had grown up in Britain would not be looking overseas for partners. They would be marrying those who had been brought up in the same way as themselves. Illiterate peasants from the Punjab would not suit them. All this completely ignored the appallingly low living standards which most people in the Indian subcontinent endured. For them, winning the right to live in Britain was like winning the football pools, and those who had been lucky enough to get to Britain were expected to give their relations back in the subcontinent the chance to enjoy some of the same riches. The custom of the arranged marriage was a ready tool ready to help them carry out this family obligation.

There were also rather more sinister reasons why the father of an Indian or Pakistani girl in Britain might prefer her to marry someone from the subcontinent. The boy would be likely to make a far more docile son-in-law than a boy brought up in Britain, and certainly would not expect the same sort of wage. Indeed, if he caused any trouble, if he became too demanding, he could be told that if he did not watch out the Home Office could be enlisted to speed his passage home.

And so, as the years went by, we did not see fewer people entering the country as husbands and wives, as fiancés and fiancées. We saw more and more; and by the time I left the Home Office there was not the slightest evidence of the flow abating.

But back to the immediate problem with which, at the beginning of 1983, Willie and I were faced. The immigration rules which had been thrown out by the House had tried to comply with the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights without allowing completely free entry for spouses and fiancés, but at the general election the Conservative Party had promised to toughen up immigration control not weaken it and, in saying that a man could import a wife or fiancée provided his primary purpose in marrying or contracting to marry the girl was not to obtain entry into the country for her, the rules marked a weakening of the control. And, said the Tory backbenchers, if we cannot do what Parliament wants to do because of a bunch of unworldly lawyers in the European Court of Human Rights, we are in a real mess and the government had better try and get us out of it. Much the same arguments against equally unworldly decisions of the Court are advanced today.

Willie and I went to see the executive of the 1922 Committee where there was much hand-wringing but no suggestions as to how to sort out the mess; and eventually with heavy hearts we decided we had no option but to table another set of rules broadly similar to those that had been rejected. All we could do as a sop was make a change in the burden of proof and require an applicant to prove that the primary purpose of the marriage was not to obtain entry rather than make the immigration officer show that it was. By offering this very small concession we managed to persuade a reluctant House to let the new rules through.

There was one type of case which a minister always dealt with, even if no MP had shown an interest in the matter. Every case of a person claiming the right to stay in Britain because of fear of persecution in the country from which he had come deserved, and got, the most careful consideration.

Back in 1983 there was a Refugee Council which took an interest in the welfare of those who sought asylum, but there was no formal procedure to ensure that individual cases were brought to the attention of the council. Often, therefore, the only investigation into a claim for asylum was carried out by a refugee section at the headquarters of the Immigration Service in Lunar House, Croydon.

Before my arrival in the Home Office a man called Papasoiu had travelled to Britain from the Continent and had walked into a police station in the East End, presumably to ask for help. He could not speak a word of English and at first the police, who called in numerous interpreters to assist, did not even know the man’s nationality. Eventually, however, someone recognised him as a Romanian and when questioned by a Romanian interpreter Mr Papasoiu said that he had been imprisoned in Romania for trying to leave the country without permission and on his release had made a second and successful attempt at escape. Naturally he was frightened of going back and wanted to stay in Britain as a refugee. He did not explain why he had chosen Britain as his place of refuge or how he had found his way to Britain.

At subsequent interviews the story was enlarged and enlarged, and eventually Mr Papasoiu was saying that he had been imprisoned not once but three times and each time had been imprisoned for three years, making nine years in all. Enquiries were made through our post in Bucharest and the Home Office was told that it was most improbable that Mr Papasoiu had been treated as he suggested. On the basis of this information, and because Mr Papasoiu, with his changes of story, could hardly be thought a reliable witness, the application for asylum was turned down.

This was the state of play when I came on the scene. The application for asylum had been rejected but no arrangements had been made for Papasoiu’s removal; and in due course I was asked by officials whether appropriate arrangements should be put in hand. No one suggested to me that the refusal of asylum did not necessarily mean that he should be removed. Still less did anyone suggest that the case should go forward to the Secretary of State for him to decide whether and, if so, when removal should take place. As far as I could see the buck stopped with me. And I accepted the advice given me by officials that there was no chance of any other country accepting Mr Papasoiu and the only place to which he could be returned was Romania, the place from which he had said that he had come.

I do not know how it came to the notice of Bernard Braine (then MP for Essex SE) that Papasoiu was about to be removed, but on the very day on which removal had been planned Bernard rang me up and asked me to reverse the decision. I said that in the absence of new evidence I did not think I could. He was not pleased and delivered a broadside on the BBC. The case was then taken up by others and soon there developed a press campaign of vilification and abuse the likes of which I had never before experienced, and have never experienced since. In the Sunday Express Michael Toner virtually accused me of being a murderer. Every word spoken by Papasoiu was accepted as gospel truth, every rebuttal by the Home Office was summarily dismissed. Toner’s choice phrases included:

Gradually the truth emerged, much no doubt to Mr Toner’s displeasure. The Romanians would not allow Papasoiu to enter the country and in due course he arrived in Austria where, it turned out, he was wanted for crimes committed on a previous visit.

When next the British people saw Papasoiu he was on television yelling from a window at his Austrian refugee camp that he wanted to marry the girl who, while he had been in England, had been teaching him English. The English girl promptly announced that she had already rejected his advances. Then came the news which proved that the Home Office had been right all along. It was discovered that, far from being in prison in Romania, Mr Papasoiu had spent the previous ten years wandering around Europe, much of the time in Italy.

For nearly a month Gilly and I suffered appalling abuse from Toner and others, but when the Home Office was entirely vindicated only the Daily Mail wrote anything which could, by the greatest stretch of imagination, be termed an apology. From Toner himself there was a deafening silence.

The whole episode taught me many lessons. I learned of the reluctance of the British press ever to admit they are wrong. I learned that it is not enough for a minister to make the right decision. He has got to take a great deal of time dressing up that decision in the right language so that the dumbest of journalists will understand why it had to be taken and the most astute lawyer cannot say that it has been taken without proper consideration of all the facts and without following the proper procedures. It also taught me that the first job of a Minister of State is to take the shot and shell which might otherwise rain on his Secretary of State. I certainly performed that task admirably.

Following the Papasoiu case it was decided to remove the distinction between asylum and refugee status – a distinction not recognised by anyone outside the Home Office. Far more important, it was decided that in any future case where an individual was claiming asylum but was unrepresented by lawyers, the Refugee Council would be told, so that it could make representations on the individual’s behalf. The decision turned out to have wide and not altogether satisfactory implications because when the flow of people seeking asylum later increased dramatically, long delays in processing applications were aggravated by delays on the part of the council.

Soon the 1983 election was upon us, the first in which I was given a fairly big speaking role outside my own constituency. It is easy to say now that the Falklands War and the reviving economy made success certain; but the advantage could all have been thrown away in a bad campaign. But thanks to Cecil Parkinson, the campaign was as slick and professional as any I have known. I only spent five days in Ribble Valley; the rest of the time I spent travelling round the country. Perhaps keeping out of the way accounted for my substantial majority. The result in Ribble Valley (which had been created in the wake of boundary changes earlier in the year, but with Clitheroe town still its centre) was:

The government had increased its overall majority to 144. I went down to London as soon as it was clear that the government was safely back in office. I busied myself spring-cleaning the pantry in our house in Courtenay Street while I waited for a call from No. 10. Nothing happened and eventually I rang what I hoped was still my private office and asked the chap who I hoped was still my secretary to try and find out what was going on. A few minutes later I learned what I should have known all along. If ministers were staying put they would not hear anything. I was advised to come into the Home Office at once to see the new Secretary of State, Leon Brittan.

Leon was sitting on the same sofa as the one from which Willie had greeted me. He looked quite overcome and kept saying ‘I can’t believe it.’ Neither could several others, who told me that they thought promotion from Chief Secretary to Home Secretary far too big a step. Goodness knows what the same people thought when not all that long afterwards someone was promoted from Chief Whip to Home Secretary.

In September 1983 Gilly and I went on a visit to India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Our travelling companions were Hayden Phillips, the under-secretary in the Home Office responsible for immigration and later Permanent Secretary in the Lord Chancellor’s Department, and Jim Acton, my Private Secretary. The purpose of the trip was to see how immigration control operated in the subcontinent where all applications to come to Britain for settlement were processed. Visitor visas had not yet been introduced, but even so there was a considerable burden of work at our posts.

Arriving in Karachi we visited our small post there and then flew up to Islamabad. Pakistan was out of the Commonwealth at the time so our host was the Ambassador, Sir Oliver Forster. Anthony Goodenough, later a High Commissioner, first in Ghana and then in Canada, and after retirement a neighbour of ours in Somerset, was Head of Chancery. We went up to Murree, a hill station, and on to Nathi Gali where there was a pretty little church, locked but, as one could see through the windows, in perfect condition. On the way down we stopped in a square in the centre of garrison town called Abbottabad (the place where Bin Laden met his death). When Jim was not looking I strode across the road and into a shop. Minutes later Hayden realised I had gone, turned on Jim and grasping him by the collar shouted: ‘You’ve lost the minister!’ A frantic search followed which ended in an army surplus store where I was inspecting the ties on display. I picked the best-looking one which turned out to be the tie of the Pakistan Army Junior Catering Corps.

In those days there was an English-language newspaper in Pakistan called The Leader. One letter in the correspondence columns read thus: ‘On behalf of the Punjab Town Residents Association I seek the cooperation of your esteemed daily and request you to kindly highlight our grievances through your bold columns. The main problems of the residents are enumerated seriatim below.’ There then followed a catalogue of misfortunes of monstrous proportions.

In the same edition there was a headline ‘TRAIN SEAT SELLERS’ GANG ATTACK RAILWAY WORKER’:

In Islamabad there was the second largest British Embassy in the world. This was largely because of the number of immigration officers and Foreign Office staff there to process applications by people hoping to come and live in Britain.

A member of the embassy staff was in trouble. He had been in the habit of visiting a local restaurant, always taking with him his own pot of tea. The owner of the establishment had accepted that he was a young man of eccentric tastes who liked only one particular blend of tea which was not obtainable in Islamabad. Unfortunately, a zealous priest interested in the strict enforcement of the laws prohibiting the consumption of alcohol began to take a close interest in the young man’s behaviour and one night he brought to the restaurant a policeman who insisted on inspecting the contents of the teapot. It contained whisky. The whole incident received much publicity in the Pakistani press and became known as ‘The Teapot Scandal’.

On the morning of our last day in Pakistan we set off for Mirpur in Azad Kashmir, the area from which very many people had come to settle in Britain. In Mirpur I was ushered into a suffocatingly hot schoolroom where I met many of the elders and people who were reckoned to have immigration problems. Throughout my discussions I was constantly interrupted by an argumentative individual squatting on his haunches at the back of the throng. Shortly after returning to England I went to address a meeting in Rochdale. The hall was packed with Pakistanis and I began my address by explaining my responsibilities in the Home Office and telling them that I had only recently got back from Pakistan where I had gone to study immigration problems. As I spoke my eyes roamed round the room, and to my amazement I saw sitting in the front row the very man who had plagued me in Mirpur. ‘What the devil are you doing here?’ I said. ‘The last time I saw you you were making a thorough nuisance of yourself in Mirpur.’ He was astonished to be recognised and the rest of the audience thought it a colossal joke that I had already encountered in their homeland a well-known local barrack-room lawyer and loud mouth. They gave me a very easy time for the rest of the evening, with members of the audience constantly pointing at the pest in the front row and giggling.

One girl I saw in Mirpur said that she had only recently arrived from England, having come to meet her fiancé for the first time. ‘What do you think of him?’ I said. In a broad Lancashire accent she replied, ‘He’s bloody smashing.’

In another interview I asked a young boy why, if he really wanted to marry the girl to whom he said he was engaged, he was not prepared to have her live with him in Pakistan. To my surprise he did not say that the girl did not want to leave England. His answer was that he could not stand the weather in Pakistan.

After Mirpur we were taken to see a dam which had recently been completed and then to a village and a school where we were supposed to be meeting a group of people described to me as local lawyers. I was escorted up onto a platform where a table was laid for lunch for ourselves and one or two nobs. We were, as usual, running behind time and I said that I had to get down into the body of the hall at once and mix with the lawyers. That was my undoing. Mix I did, and every now and then a tasty morsel was popped into my mouth. Sat down on a sofa flanked by two voluble lawyers I allowed a pink custardy substance flecked with flies to be placed in my hands, and unthinkingly I dispatched it in the normal fashion.

In the afternoon we flew to Lahore and then on to Delhi. I was already beginning to feel distinctly odd, but the High Commissioner Robert Wade-Gery and Sally, his wife, had arranged a working supper and somehow or other I had to stay on my feet.

We were due to fly to Agra the following morning but by bedtime it was obvious that I would be in no fit state to make the journey. Sally Wade-Gery produced sundry multi-coloured pills and I fell in to a deep sleep. Gilly went to Agra, I slept on and at about noon I woke to the telephone ringing and the Wade-Gerys inviting me to join them for lunch. I did not feel at all bad. The onset of illness in India can be dramatically quick, but often so is the recovery, and I was very grateful to Sally for her pills.

After a busy day or two in Delhi we were entitled to a mid-tour rest. We flew up to Srinagar and spent two days on a houseboat on the Dal Lake. There were quite a few houseboats, each of them, I was told, separately owned. Rather confusingly, however, every one of the owners was called Mr Butt. Abdul, the assistant of our Mr Butt, said: ‘May the blessings of Almighty Allah be upon you and you’ll have a helluva good time.’ We then went up to a hill station called Pahalgam, 8,000 feet up in the Himalayas. As we arrived, in a torrential downpour, five or six young boys on ponies tore down the main street towards us. The shops flanking the street had quite impressive fronts but were built as if for a film set with no backs. We booked into our hotel and then in the afternoon we hired a taxi to take us further into the mountains, but when we reached the police post at the end of the town our driver refused to take us because, he said, of the danger of landslides. At the police post alongside the policeman in his box were two scruffy individuals with two scruffy ponies. Gilly, who had earlier expressed a wish to go for a ride but had seen no ponies for hire in the town, asked the two men if we could have a ride on their ponies and eventually, after an initial show of reluctance and when, with assistance from our driver, a price had been agreed, the ponies were handed into our care.

We set off past the police post and the road wound its way up the mountain side via a series of hairpin bends. Soon, however, the ponies had the common sense to realise that a great deal of effort would be saved if they, as it were, ironed out the bends, and, having adopted this course they soon reached the summit. Going up was not too easy for the riders. Coming down was terrifying.

We returned to our hotel and were told that a rare treat was in store for us. We could watch Gone with the Wind on television. Gilly was delighted. I was nervous. On every previous occasion on which she had watched Gone with the Wind she had become pregnant. But I took the risk, and competing with the spectacle on the screen were Pahalgam’s golden eagles as they swooped down past our bedroom window to forage in the hotel’s rubbish bins.

We travelled on to Dhaka in Bangladesh. A day or two later we were due to fly up to Sylhet, but at the airport we were told that there was some delay because of the weather and we were two hours late for our planned meeting with Sylhet politicians. The fried eggs cooked for the nine o’clock meeting were waiting for us at eleven and we ate them with a smile. Sylhet is set in splendid countryside with tea gardens spread over the surrounding hills, and it was an important place for us to visit because it was from this part of Bangladesh that very large numbers of people had come to settle in Britain. The region which borders on Assam is a long way from the sea, but for decades men from there had travelled down to ports such as Chittagong and then spent their lives as seamen. This meant that long before air travel and mass immigration the citizens of Sylhet knew a fair amount about the outside world, some of them even having relatives who, having found their way as seamen to British ports, had decided to stay there. So we were there to see our immigration staff up there at work and learn how they investigated doubtful claims to settle in Britain.

Immigration staff from Dhaka wanted to investigate the case of a woman who was claiming the right to join her father in Britain and we set off across the paddy fields to the village where she lived to try and find out whether she was the daughter of the English resident and, if she was, whether she was a child or an adult and, if an adult, whether she was still single. At the house we were offered various strange drinks which our guides advised us to refuse; and a young boy then shot up a tree and presented us with coconuts which did us all a world of good. We then set off back to Sylhet, the officers armed with copious notes which, together with statements from the man in Britain, they would study before ruling on the case.

The soil of Bangladesh is very fertile but the rural population is vast and struggles to live above starvation level. The spur to emigrate is therefore obvious, and when we were there every conceivable subterfuge was being used to obtain entry into Britain. Large numbers of demonstrably false applications were refused, but when an application was refused a new application was at once lodged and this meant that the backlog of applications was growing longer and longer. Every effort, therefore, had to be made to root out fraudulent claims in the hope that it might discourage similar fraudulent claims from others.

I had to make it plain to the press that there was no prospect of our already large staff in Dhaka engaged on the processing of applications being increased even further. It was all very well talking about people having to wait in a queue before their applications to enter Britain were dealt with. We were overwhelmed with cases – a large proportion of which were fraudulent. A typical case was one where a man applied on behalf of someone he claimed to be his son. The son was asked how many brothers and sisters he had and said ‘two’. The man claiming to be the father replied in similar terms but was then confronted with his tax return in which he had set out the names of six children. The man admitted that he had indeed claimed for six children but said he had done so incorrectly and only in order to get a bigger tax allowance. Customers of this type were quite indignant when their immigration applications were turned down, not appearing to realise that having shown themselves to be untruthful in one respect they could hardly complain if people were reluctant to take what they said in another matter at its face value.