Are civil servants guilty of doing the people smugglers’ work?

How naive of me. I thought Shabana Mahmood would stop the boats – “because she has to”, as I put it, in a column written when she was appointed last month. But that assumed that the Home Office had the capacity as an institution to give effect to her policies.

The new home secretary has been in post for only seven weeks, a unit of time known as a “Liz Truss” – but she seemed to bring a new energy, decisiveness and plain-speaking to the role. One official was recorded as saying: “The speed of decision-making is something to get used to.”

What she cannot do so immediately, though, is change a Whitehall behemoth employing 50,000 civil servants.

The scale of the problem is set out in a report that the Home Office has tried to keep secret for two and a half years. It describes a “culture of defeatism” in the department, often “without sufficient appreciation of the operational reality” and “falsely reassuring” ministers and “not wishing to tell difficult truths”.

The report was written by Nick Timothy, now a Conservative MP, who was Theresa May’s special adviser both at the Home Office and at No 10. He has strong views on immigration, but he also has a good understanding of how the Home Office works – and how much it doesn’t work.

Mahmood understands this instinctively, and reacted to the Timothy report even before The Times published it on Wednesday. She said the department is “not yet fit for purpose” – a reference to her predecessor John Reid’s description 20 years ago. He tried to make it more effective by splitting it from the Ministry of Justice, but Timothy found that the Home Office still suffered from low morale.

One of the fundamental problems is that civil servants do not want to work on immigration. “They see the migration and borders group as a dangerous place in which to work, with lots that goes wrong and plenty of scrutiny,” Timothy said. More than that, even if officials understand the need for firm immigration control, few of them are keen to work on putting people on deportation flights.

Mahmood can say, and many would applaud her, that a tough approach to people with no right to be in the country is a precondition of a compassionate immigration policy, but that doesn’t mean that civil servants want to be at the sharp end of enforcement.

However, Mahmood also claims to be turning things round.

Someone speaking for her to The Times reacted to Timothy’s report that staff were spending work hours in “listening circles” to discuss their feelings about social and political issues: “She will ensure this department is focused on delivering for the public. And she will give short shrift to any time and taxpayer money wasted on self-indulgent talking shops.”

The same source said that Antonia Romeo, who took over as the top civil servant at the Home Office in April, had “formed a formidable partnership” with Mahmood in her previous roles at the Ministry of Justice, and “will energise the Home Office to deliver for ministers and the country”.

But Mahmood has had a bad week on the delivery front. The failure to find a credible chair for the grooming gangs inquiry – talking of jobs that no one wants to do – is another embarrassment laid at the Home Office’s door.

And the “one in, one out, one back in” farce has drawn attention to the difficulty of making the pilot scheme work for returning migrants to France. Although the scheme started surprisingly quickly after it was agreed with Emmanuel Macron in July, it has been painfully slow to expand – only 26 have been returned so far, and one of those has now come back. It will not act as a significant deterrent until at least as many migrants are sent back each week as arrive, and arrivals are currently running at an average of 800 a week.

Unless the creaking and defeatist bureaucracy of the Home Office can develop a bit of can-do spirit, Mahmood’s ambition may be put on hold.

Her desire for the top job remains undimmed. She told a fringe meeting at Labour’s annual conference in Liverpool this month that any MP who says they do not want to be prime minister is “lying”. And she has just been elected to the chair of Labour’s national executive, a powerful position behind the scenes for anyone interested in the machinery of leadership elections.

But unless she can succeed where many home secretaries have failed in turning the Home Office into a machine that can deliver what the people want, especially on crime and immigration, she will not be following Theresa May’s path from Home Office to higher office.