Blunkett is in deep yoghurt

According to the Daily Telegraph "Home Office letters painted a picture of a visa application that could have taken months suddenly being fully granted in weeks. One letter to the nanny, Leoncia Casalme, dated April 23, 2003, said her application had been accepted as valid but that it could take up to a year.

Only 19 days later, the nanny - who was working for Mr Blunkett's then lover Kimberly Quinn - was told that her request to stay permanently had been approved.

The letters, published in today's Daily Mail, will heighten speculation about whether Mr Blunkett had a role in granting the visa."

The likelihood is that there will be no "smoking gun" memo. Clearly Mr Blunkett is wise enough to have known that such a document would be political suicide. What is much more likely is that Mr Blunkett made no secret of the fact that an early resolution of the issue would give him some "satisfaction", and no doubt there are legions of civil servants within his office that would bend over backwards, forwards or any which way to give him this small pleasure.

That is of course the way of the world. But Mr Blunkett, since the early days, has adopted a rigid and hard-line approach to immigration and Asylum seekers. Hence, any evidence at all that he allowed his personal infatuations to influence his judgement
in this case will appear as the worst sort of hypocrisy. And he will be hounded out of office. Rightly? Probably.