Somehow the memo never reached Priti Patel. Ever since Boris Johnson asked her to be home secretary, Priti Vacant had confidently assumed the government’s default position had been to be unpleasant to foreigners. Wave machines to push back refugees trying to cross the Channel in rubber boats? That will do nicely. But since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Patel has failed to read the room. The Conservatives have now picked up the national mood of compassion for people fleeing a war zone and are falling over themselves to extend a welcome. Well, up to a point.
But Vacant has remained steadfastly old school. Only refugees with close family ties to someone in the UK could apply for a visa, she insisted. That’s if they could find a visa application centre that was open. Patel had had a lot of fun opening and closing centres in Calais and Lille with no warning and watching the distress of refugees pointlessly commuting between the two cities.
Eventually enough was enough, even for the most hardline Tory MPs. Their constituents were demanding the UK did more and the only concession they were getting from Patel was that refugees could fill in their visas online. Assuming they had access to the relevant documents they had probably left behind in Ukraine. And internet access. Otherwise they were screwed.
It reached the point where the Home Office was considered to be a failed state in itself. No one had any confidence that Patel could organise an adequate humanitarian response and so no one even bothered to ask her. Instead, The Suspect has now handed over responsibility for immigration to Michael Gove, the levelling up minister. Not because his department is ideally suited for handling a refugee crisis, but because he is just about the only cabinet minister who can be trusted not to mess up such a sensitive, logistical problem. Or to at least give the impression of not messing it up.
So it was Gove who came to the Commons to make the statement on homes for Ukraine, the government’s plan to welcome more refugees to the UK. Patel was conspicuous by her absence. Too much, even for someone as thick-skinned as her. To complete her humiliation, the shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, made a guest appearance even though she wouldn’t get to speak. Just to rub salt in the wounds. Johnson might just as well have done the decent thing and fired her there and then. This was death by a thousand cuts.
But Gove likes nothing more than someone else’s discomfort, so he put in one of his trademark Commons performances. One that oozed self-promotion and insincerity in equal measure. This wasn’t personal. He would have been just as happy stabbing any of his cabinet colleagues in the back. So he began by praising the work of the Home Office. Patel had done such a marvellous job so far that it would have been a mistake to pile on the extra pressure of supervising the new homes for Ukraine scheme. There was only so much you could expect a totally incompetent home secretary to concentrate on.
The Govester then went on to outline the details of the scheme before praising the generosity of the British people. We had taken in Jews fleeing Nazi persecution and now we would extend the same offer to the Ukrainians. Which wasn’t quite true. We had taken in the children of Jews in the late 30s. We hadn’t been quite so welcoming to adult Jewish men and women. The ability of every country to rewrite its own history is undimmed.
The shadow minister for levelling up, Lisa Nandy, gave the scheme a cautious thumbs up. Though she had a few practical issues. How were Ukrainian applicants supposed to find a family to sponsor them? By advertising themselves on Twitter and Instagram? And how were traumatised women and children necessarily going to get the support they needed? Nandy had rung loads of local authorities and none of them had been contacted by the government department.
Gove couldn’t conceal his irritation. He had personally spoken to every local authority 10 days ago and had thought through every possible problem that could arise. And though he couldn’t divulge any of the details he could assure everyone that it was all going to work brilliantly. There was nothing that could go wrong. Things going wrong was what happened under the Prittster. Now he was in charge, people should just shut up and bow down to his superior wisdom and intellect.
And that was pretty much how the rest of the session played out. MPs from both sides would say the new scheme was a vast improvement on last week’s iteration of the government’s refugee policy – a compliment received by Gove with an oleaginous smile – only to be rebuffed when they dared question the logistics. After all, we haven’t even yet managed to properly house all the Afghan and Syrian refugees we have taken in, so why was he so certain this one was going to work? A little humility would do Gove a big favour.
And what if you were a family unlucky enough to be taken in by Matt Hancock who had already signed up for the scheme. Imagine being forced to listen to the most beautiful love story ever told night after night. How you were once just a humble health secretary who just happened to fall in love with Gina. And one thing led to another and you couldn’t help breaking the rules and having a grope in your office. That almost ranks as a war crime in itself.
It took Labour’s Tan Dhesi to really raise the stakes. Look, he said. This may be a bit better but we’re still well behind the rest of Europe. Hell, we were still insisting on asking for visas. This was just another legacy of the Conservatives’ hostile environment. Now the Govester lost it. The hostile environment had been something dreamed up by Labour, so there was no point in blaming the Tories for implementing it, he snapped. Theresa May and Priti Patel had never wanted anything but the best for all the immigrants they had tried to kick out of the country. It was a view.
