Yesterday was just an average Sunday for the Home Office. A chief immigration officer was exposed for propositioning an asylum seeker for sex. Thousands of entirely innocent men and women were discovered to have been listed as having criminal records. And 230 suspected foreign terrorists were revealed to have been allowed to stay in Britain as asylum seekers on full state benefits.

Another day, another set of Home Office scandals.

In the past month, we have also discovered that foreign criminals have been released to wander the streets; that the official in charge of illegal immigration hasn’t got “the faintest idea” how many there are here; and that illegal immigrants have been working in the Home Office itself.

So frequent are the revelations of Home Office chaos – chaos endangers every one of us – that something seems almost wrong when we wake up in the morning and do not learn of another scandal.

And it’s not just incompetence. Even when ministers own up to the latest mess, they rarely give the full story.

Take the new Home Secretary, Dr John Reid. His start has hardly been propitious. Confronted last week by the news that illegal immigrants had been working in his own department, he did what has become Labour ministers’ stock in trade: he dissembled.

Dr Reid remarked dismissively that their arrest showed that the Immigration and Nationality Directorate was doing its job properly.

It actually showed the opposite. The cleaners had been working there not for days, not for weeks, not even for months – but for years.

Freshly in post, Dr Reid, of course, cannot be blamed for the mess itself. Indeed, a bruiser with a brain could be exactly what the Home Office needs.

But the likelihood is that, even if Dr Reid grasps the scale of the problem and determines to take action, he will fail.

The reason, as I saw with my own eyes when I spent time in the Home Office researching my biography of the former Home Secretary, David Blunkett, is that the Home Office is almost beyond repair.

There are two problems: one practical, one political.

The Home Office is a monster of a department, with responsibilities such as penal policy, counter-terrorism, the intelligence services, the police and anti-social behaviour, any one of which is more than enough for a department of its own. It is unmanageable.

I remember the pride with which David Blunkett directed me to a flow-chart which showed the Home Office’s new management structure, after he had cleaned out some of the dead wood, brought in new senior officials, and supposedly instituted new lines of responsibility and authority.

But however much of an improvement this might have been on what went before, the new structure still looked like a tangled mass of spaghetti.

The Home Office is simply too big, with too many responsibilities and too much paperwork for any one minister to master. It is no wonder that another previous Home Secretary told me that documents for which he had to take responsibility were wheeled into his office on a trolley, just so that he was able honestly to say that he had looked at them.

But the structure of the Home Office is not the worst of it. Much more damaging is the culture of the place. John Spellar, a former Labour minister, says that its staff resemble a group of 1960s sociology graduates. He is spot on. The Home Office culture puts the ‘rights’ of criminals above those of the public.

Awful as the record of recent Home Secretaries has been, it is not just Labour Home Secretaries who have presided over this The epitome of the limp, ineffectual, worse than useless criminals’ friend was Conservative grandee, Lord Hurd.

Michael Howard is the only successful Home Secretary in living memory because he refused to accept what he was told by his officials – that his job was to manage the growth in crime. He saw only one purpose to his job – reducing crime.

If Dr Reid is to match Mr Howard’s record, he has to do two things.

First, he must preside over the destruction of his department. No minister likes to think they cannot cope with running their department, but if Dr Reid was to implement a total restructuring of the Home Office's functions he would show his strength of purpose, not weakness.

But hand in hand with that, he must grapple with the culture. He must inculcate the idea that reducing crime is all that matters, and that victims – and potential victims – are the Home Office’s one true concern.

The grip of the 1960s sociologists is firm – not merely on the Home Office but on criminology. The chances of his succeeding are slim. But if crime is ever to be dealt with properly, it is a prerequisite that the Home Office as it exists today is destroyed.