Despite Straw’s concerns that it might be the kind of issue that could ‘blow up in our faces’ the PM (pictured with Straw in 2005) never changed his mind throughout his three terms in office

The true story of how Labour not only lost control of immigration but actively encouraged it can only now be told — thanks to detailed testimony from the civil servants and ministers who witnessed and participated in the hithero concealed twists and turns of the government.

At the heart of the problem was Blair’s complete lack of interest — though this would come back to haunt him.

He refused, for instance, to create a Cabinet committee dedicated to immigration or to appoint a specialist adviser until midway in his premiership.

‘Blair never discussed immigration in 1997,’ confirmed his first Cabinet Secretary Robin Butler, the most senior civil servant at Downing Street. ‘I doubt if he ever thought about it.’

Inevitably, this set Labour’s tone on the issue. Ministers were warned by Downing Street not to mention immigration.

Any doubts about this message were removed by the government’s announcement soon after the election that it was introducing a Human Rights Bill. Suspect asylum seekers would be guaranteed the right to have their cases heard by a British judge. This was interpreted across the world as the beginning of a new tolerance.

Straw told Tim Walker, the head of the Immigration and Nationality Department: ‘Tony’s not interested.’ Compounding the problem at the heart of government, Straw added he wasn’t interested either.

B Efore becoming Home Secretary, he had dismissed as ‘racist’ Tory warnings that Britain was becoming a honeypot for Third World economic migrants, who were entering Britain as tourists and then claiming asylum.

Yet the facts were against him: Home Office officials estimated that in 1995, asylum seekers had claimed more than £200 million in benefits — yet only 5 per cent were genuine refugees.

The Tories had tried to stop this opportunism, not least by admitting asylum seekers only from the small number of countries recognised as tyrannies. This didn’t wash with Straw. According to him, all asylum seekers arriving in Britain were genuinely fleeing from oppression and torture.

His officials were instructed to expand the list of approved nations, so Nigerians and Afghans, among others, could also claim asylum.

Meanwhile, Blair’s attitude to immigration had filtered through to the immigration HQ in Croydon, where there was already a two-year backlog of 52,000 applications. Most, according to some officials, were riddled with lies.

But they naturally assumed that Blair wanted all immigrants, including suspect asylum seekers, to be treated generously.

Even failed applicants became entitled to benefits. And the promise of easy money spread round the world, bringing about a steep increase in asylum seekers.

‘Why don’t we stipulate that immigrants must speak English before we grant them British nationality? To make British nationality a prize?’ suggested the immigration chief, Tim Walker. ‘No,’ Straw replied. In public, he was keen to show he wasn’t an easy touch. There should be stronger controls at the borders, he told the Commons.

Yet behind the scenes, he continued to make it easier for asylum seekers. And harder for officials.

To add to the problems at immigration HQ in Croydon, the increase in applicants coincided with the loss of 1,000 jobs and the collapse of a new computer system.

Officials were in despair. Thousands of Albanians and Iraqis, they told Straw, were now illegally entering the country by posing as Kosovan refugees. And they were blatant about it, having made no attempt to learn any known dialect used in Kosovo.

To prove their point, officials set a group claiming to be Kosovan a test in which they were asked to identify well-known landmarks in Pristina, the capital. On the first day, all the Albanians posing as Kosovans were exposed as liars.

On the second day, another group of Albanian suspects passed the test with flying colours. They had clearly been briefed by lawyers.

Straw’s answer? With the support of Blair, he decided the best way to deter bogus applicants was by giving them food vouchers rather than cash. But he refused to acknowledge most asylum seekers were just seeking a better standard of living.

Consequently, officials increasingly approved suspect applications rather than engage in endless appeals before judges whose interpretation of the new human rights law favoured bogus applicants.

Publicly, the government spoke about stepping up deportations. In practice, there were insufficient staff to carry them out. As Croydon approached meltdown, deportations declined, the backlog increased and news of the chaos spread.

The result? Hundreds of thousands more headed for Britain.

The only amusing diversion, in the midst of this maelstrom, was Alastair Campbell’s call to the head of the immigration service: ‘Are there any “good” news stories that we can use for the Sundays?’ No, but there were plenty of bad ones. Kent council was inundated by thousands of asylum seekers who had landed at Dover. When they were dispersed, locals protested that blocks of flats and even streets were becoming foreign territory.

Sarah Spencer, an academic who influenced the government on immigration after 1997, admitted later: ‘There was no policy for integration. We just believed the migrants would integrate’

Blair continued to ignore any problems. Instead, he announced he was making it easier for foreign students to study in Britain.

This came as a surprise to immigration officials. They warned Straw it amounted to an invitation to bogus students to enrol in sham language schools and then remain after their visas had expired.

Their prophecy, after an additional 75,000 students arrived the following year, duly materialised.

As migration numbers mounted, Straw realised he had to do something. So, in 1999, a law was passed that outlawed bogus marriage, fined lorry drivers for smuggling in migrants and slightly reduced benefits for asylum seekers.

This might have improved matters, but for one thing. The very same law strengthened the rights of asylum seekers — by allowing them to stay in Britain until they’d exhausted every possible appeal.

Soon, there were lawyers patrolling Heathrow. Clients hot off the plane were assured of lengthy delays before there was any chance of them being sent back.

Again, the good news about ‘tolerant’ Britain spread, encouraging Kurds, Tamils and Sri Lankans to enter as tourists before claiming asylum. At the same time, migrants from the Balkans and Afghanistan headed for Calais, where they boarded lorries to be smuggled into the country.

Others — in their tens of thousands — destroyed their identity documents, making it impossible for officials to deport them.

Before long, there were tens of thousands of new asylum applications. Marriage rackets were flourishing and lawyers were schooling applicants on what to tell immigration officers. By June 1999, the backlog of asylum applications had risen to 125,000, compared with 52,000 when Labour came to office, while legal immigration had soared to 360,000. As Blair ruefully admitted years later, Britain was becoming known as the asylum capital of Europe.

At least the increasing media outcry made him realise he needed to do something. Headlines were a language he understood.

According to David Omand, Straw’s most senior civil servant: ‘If Downing Street was irritated by the Home Office’s failure to produce the results Blair wanted, a chain would be yanked, and the media reports from Alastair Campbell’s briefing signalled that Straw’s stock had fallen.’

While the Home Secretary shouldered the blame, immigration was finally — if only occasionally — being discussed in No 10. But Blair remained unconvinced that government policies were at fault. The reason for the upsurge in asylum seekers, he claimed, was the improving economy and our failure to make ID cards compulsory.

At no stage did he ask Omand probing questions about the serious problems faced by officials or the terrible mess in Croydon.

Like Straw, Blair was careful never publicly to mention the rising number of immigrants from India and Pakistan who could now enter Britain. Nor did he consider how to provide housing, schools and healthcare for an additional 300,000 people arriving a year.

Least of all did either of them question whether the immigrants would have any effect on the lives of the British working class. (Nine years later, a report by the Migration Advisory Committee found that 23 British workers had been displaced for every 100 foreign-born workers employed here.)

Could this chicanery get any worse? It did — with the appointment of Barbara Roche as Junior Immigration Minister.

Blair refused to create a Cabinet committee dedicated to immigration or to appoint a specialist adviser until midway in his premiership. Pictured: Blair being interview  in February  2016

Blair’s only instruction to her was to deport bogus asylum seekers. But Roche wasn’t playing. In her first conversation with a senior immigration official, she was candid: ‘I think asylum seekers should be allowed to stay. Removal takes too long, and it’s emotional.’ Even the word ‘bogus,’ she maintained, created a negative feeling.

‘It was clear Roche wanted more immigrants to come to Britain,’ recalled Stephen Boys-Smith, the new head of the immigration directorate. ‘She didn’t see her job as controlling entry, but by looking at the wider picture “in a holistic way” she wanted us to see the benefit of a multicultural society.’

Jack Straw never openly contradicted Roche — it simply wasn’t worth the risk of alienating the Labour Party. So she set to work on a speech, in which she outlined the advantages of reducing controls to immigration and portrayed asylum seekers as skilled labour. She didn’t discuss what she was going to say with Straw.

‘He wasn’t interested. And nor was Blair,’ she said. ‘[Blair] didn’t understand the process and wasn’t interested in the detail . . . He was shallow. He had no grasp of immigration policy. There was no policy.’

Blair’s only instruction to his new junior immigration minister Barbara Roche was to deport bogus asylum seekers

In her speech, Roche argued for more work permits for migrants, skating over the fact that the number of permits had already risen to 40,000 — compared with 25,000 when Labour entered office.

That way, she claimed, economic migrants would no longer have to pose as asylum seekers. Roche described them as the ‘entrepreneurs, the scientists, the high-technology specialists who make the global economy tick’. She refused to be tied down on how many more would arrive as a direct result of her policy. Setting target figures, she said, would be a ‘foolish’ mistake.

Once Roche had finished her draft, she showed it to Straw, but he made no comment. Finally, the speech was sent to No 10 for approval. At this point, Charlie Falconer, minister at the Cabinet Office, spotted that Roche was using economic migrants as a smokescreen for increasing immigration. The speech, he said, should not be delivered.

His warning was ignored — so the pro-immigration lobby assumed Blair endorsed Roche’s views. The speech was duly delivered to a select gathering of the converted.

‘Well done, Barbara,’ Blair told Roche soon afterwards. Despite its controversial content, her speech passed relatively unnoticed. But migrants quickly grasped its importance and passed the news on to their friends and family across the world.

Labour was letting more people in, they told them, and — unlike other European countries — Britain would provide benefits and state housing.

Few in Whitehall had understood the implications, so there was no discussion about providing additional homes, schools or hospitals.

One of Roche’s legacies was hundreds more migrants camped in squalor in Sangatte, outside Calais, where they tried to smuggle themselves onto lorries.

News about the new liberalism — and in particular the welfare benefits — now began attracting Somalis who’d previously settled in other EU countries. Although there was no historic or cultural link between Somalia and Britain, more than 200,000 came.

Since most were untrained and would be dependent on welfare, the Home Office could have refused them entry. But they were granted ‘exceptional leave to remain’.

As ever more asylum seekers continued to arrive, Blair remained mute about the large increase of immigrants.

 Even the 7/7 bombings in London by Islamist terrorists failed to rouse Blair to the danger. Instead of demanding the arrest of two Muslim preachers, who were advocating violence on the streets of London, he followed Jack Straw’s advice, who argued that the Muslim community must not be alienated

After the 2001 election, Straw was replaced by David Blunkett, who complained he’d inherited ‘a mess.’ The previous year, there had been 97,000 asylum applications, another record number. Only 10,185 were genuine. Yet only 4,870 were deported.

That clearly needed attention. But Blunkett neither discussed nor reduced immigration of ‘family members’ from the Indian sub-continent, then running at 210,000 a year.

He decided to admit asylum seekers as skilled migrants. Blair approved the ruse, giving Blunkett the go-ahead to issue 150,000 work permits in 2002.

Still the numbers rose. In 2001, Blunkett was told that over 500,000 migrants (compared with the government’s original estimate of 100,000) would have arrived by the end of the year. Fortunately for him, Blair didn’t care about the numbers — he was only concerned to announce the deportation of more bogus asylum seekers.

‘We need to build 15 detention centres,’ Blunkett replied. But Chancellor Gordon Brown would approve only three.

Get rid of the voucher system, Blair suggested, pointing out it was disliked by both trade union officials and the migrants. Officials scratched their heads. The introduction of vouchers was thought to be responsible for deterring around 100,000 a year. But Blunkett agreed the vouchers should go.

Quietly, the Home Secretary set to work. With Blair’s agreement, he reduced the backlog of asylum applications by approving the entry of 50,000 more people. ‘I want people to come here freely and I want them to work,’ Blunkett told a civil servant.

Blair agreed, but he was wary of public opinion. ‘Don’t mention the advantages of immigration in public,’ he cautioned ministers ‘because they won’t even want that.’ The electorate, he said, should be told only about the efforts to stop ‘bad’ immigration.

Naturally, Blair didn’t mention that the latest amnesty for 50,000 asylum seekers had been quietly extended to include more than 150,000 foreigners living here illegally.

This threw up some anomalies that were almost beyond parody — such as the granting of a work permit to a one-legged Romanian who described himself as a roofer.

Still more migrants came. (Numbers peaked at 591,000 in 2010, five times higher than when Blair came to power.)

Then four Algerian asylum seekers — all living on benefits — were arrested in London and Manchester in 2003 for making a bomb containing the deadly poison ricin. Smarting from the resulting outcry, Blair called Blunkett.

‘I’ve made a commitment on BBC TV about cutting down the number of asylum seekers,’ he said. ‘I hope you understand.’

‘What!’ shouted Blunkett. ‘By how much?’

‘By half within six months,’ replied Blair. With that, he ended the conversation.

As so often, the Prime Minister had deployed an empty promise to defuse a problem he had no idea how to solve. Or, as Blunkett put it, he was governing Britain via the media, and ‘he thought he could wave a magic wand and [make things] happen’.

Blunkett instructed immigration HQ to fast-track yet more asylum applications and speed up the approval of work permits.

His decisions remained unanounced, but the public had ceased to trust Labour on immigration. By the start of Blair’s third term, research revealed that 85 per cent of the electorate condemned the government’s policy.

Yet Tony Blair continued to pursue his policy regardless. Immigrants, he said, should continue to enter Britain in a managed fashion, but bogus asylum seekers were ‘a real problem’.

And for that, he had no solutions to offer.