Dealing with the Home Office/UKVI as I do, I used to think she was just spectacularily incompetent, til I realised that like Hunt she’s embraced deliberate failure. In other words, she wanted the department to achieve certain goals (in this case, to deter legitimate immigrants without actually trying to ban them) and realised that the best way to do that was to make it as dysfunctional as possible. So they’ve managed out competence, they’ve made rules and regulations opaque and contradictory, they’ve made changes without notice… We have a full time person whose job title should be Home Office Damage Migitator, and we lose hundreds of thousands of pounds every year due to what is basically vandalism.
So we have excellent conversations with our contact at the UKVI that go “we can’t advise on this new, poorly worded rule, or tell you whether your interpretation is correct. But we will take action against you if, at a later date, we decide you’re wrong”. This is a service we have to pay for, incidentally. In any sane world, this’d tell you that things are not going well. But to her, that’s a dream. I see no reason to expect better now she’s PM.