Amber Rudd has set fire to her party's own benefits record. It's a high risk strategy

In 2008, a confidential Tony Blair memo found its way into the newspapers, in which he described Gordon Brown’s decision as prime minister to “diss our own record” as a “fatal mistake.”

It is, then, something of a measure of how far we have come that the unofficial Tory leadership contest now very much unofficially underway, has already been set up as a race to see who can distance themselves the furthest from their own party’s record. Sajid Javid had been home secretary for about thirty seconds when he disowned the flagship “hostile environment” policy created by his predecessor-but-one, and now prime minister.

On Tuesday, it was Amber Rudd’s turn to do the same. Her and Sajid Javid are considered the frontrunners to replace Theresa May, and it is worth remembering he is only the home office because she failed, or perhaps refuse, to dodge the blame for the Windrush scandal which was not her fault.

And it was clear she will not be doing the same again. She is the work and pensions secretary now. A department that has surely replaced the Home Office as the “political graveyard" now. It has had six ministers in the last six years, though that may say more about the seriousness with which the Conservative Party takes it than the jobs themselves.

Rudd came to the London Olympic Park, to speak of the wonder of the paralympics, and the “superhumans” who competed in them, by way of a preamble to announce she would be scrapping the ongoing annual assessments that elderly disabled people have to go through to access benefit payments.

It was one of those rare moments in politics, where a minister’s big announcement to scrap an outrageous policy serves only to draw attention to an outrageous policy which had hitherto been wisely kept hidden.

She was, she said, ending the policy by which people with the most severe disabilities would no longer require ongoing assessment to make sure they were still eligible for them.

That, in other words, it would no longer be the case that severely disabled people with incurable conditions had to report to an assessor every year to prove they had not been to see a miracle healer.

That there had, in the last 12 months, been no laying on of hands. There had been no clandestine back bedroom hobbyistic pushing back of the boundaries of science and medicine.

From now on, the balance of probabilities would be shifted to presume that a miracle had not happened. Yes, this really was the big announcement.

At the end, it was somewhat unsurprising that members of the media wanted to know whether Rudd might not feel the best way to move on might involve some kind of apology. It was, after all, her party that had framed the debate on, “scroungers, cheats, and so on” that had done so much to make benefit claimants feel like they were doing something wrong.

“I don’t recognise that description,” she said. Through tinted windows behind her head, the Olympic Park was spread beneath a bright blue sky.

I happened to be there, seven years ago, when the then chancellor George Osborne handed out a medal at the Paralympics and endured the only boo that stadium, or indeed any Olympic venue, heard all summer. It was done because of the harsh disability assessments that government introduced.

So chastised was he by the experience that, one month later, he would say this in his party conference speech: “Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits?”

Rudd’s reply? “This was seven years ago. I’m concerned about the future.”

She may very well be the next Tory leader. She may very well be the next prime minister. But there’ll be an election at some point, and opposition parties are never slow to capitalise on instances when leading figures in governments have criticised themselves. She may very well find out, like Gordon Brown before her, that Tony Blair was right. Dissing your own record is a fatal mistake.