What is it about children and childcarers that makes them unworthy of a minister uncompromised and uncompromising, unstained and unbowed?
Although Margaret Hodge is a believer in childcare, her reputation as an Islington council chief was badly dented by an ugly and defensive response to child abuse in her patch.
Beverley Hughes's installation as Hodge's successor has brought few cheers.
She was redeemed by the Prime Minister after doing time on the back benches, where she'd been forced into a kind of political quarantine following an immigration debacle. She will not have expected that her second change would be shadowed so soon by an emerging scandal. It should be seen not as a burden but an opportunity.
The scandal that began to bleed into the news last week was triggered by the mysterious death of the boy Adam, a Nigerian child whose torso was found in the Thames in 2001. The police investigating his death unearthed a larger mystery: they tried to trace 300 black boys who had simply disappeared in the three months before his death.
Despite the political obsession with immigration, the status of these little black boys was apparently of no interest to anyone in authority.
According to the police investigating Adam's death, 'lack of immigration records made tracing impossible'.
Although private fostering, widely used among Africans in Britain, requires that local authorities be kept informed, and that they must check children's welfare, these children were unnoticed. If immigration rules encourage people to lie low, beyond the reach of the state, then children easily become invisible.
African sense of adult responsibility for children extends beyond family, beyond blood. That can be a life-saver. But in the context of illegality, or crime, or abuse, that creditable ethic can shroud a child in malevolence.
The British Association for Fostering and Adoption and several official reports have warned that the failure to register private fostering is a failure to protect.
Let's hope anti-statism, colonialism and cultural relativism don't converge in the new minister, when she gets round to saying something about the state's responsibility towards these disappeared children.
Undoubtedly, a kind of racism shrouded these children: the kind that produces immigration panics also breeds indifference to the fate of these children.
