Humanity isn’t the Home Office’s strongest suit. But then, neither is communication. Last week Richard Harrington, the refugees minister, was asked by the broadcaster LBC if the government had any plans to offshore refugees to Rwanda. He replied with an unambiguous no. He had no clue where such an idea might have come from. No one in the Home Office had discussed anything like this with him. It was a non-story; scare tactics from paranoid liberals trying to discredit Priti Patel. Not that the home secretary needs any help. She never fails to discredit herself.
Cue 10 days later and Boris Johnson was at a hangar in Lydd, Kent, to announce what he tried to convince a few bored service personnel and a handful of sceptical hacks was the new outpost of Butlin’s in Kigali. A pleasure palace for refugees more than 5,000 miles away. In a country where the problem was well out of sight of British eyes. God forbid that any Brits might have to encounter desperate people fleeing war and persecution.
Some had thought the timing was all a bit too convenient. After days of bad headlines about the prime minister’s own criminality, a chance to move things on with a policy that would go down a storm with red wall Tory voters before the May local elections and piss off just about everyone with a moral conscience. It was that cynical. All the more so because the Kigali hostel could well remain empty for years as civil rights lawyers take the government to court for acting illegally. The Potemkin Pleasuredome.
But the reality was that it was more like killing two birds with one stone. Sure, it was good to talk about something other than Partygate, but the Convict and Patel had genuinely been working on the deranged plan for months, despite the best efforts of civil servants to talk them out of it, and were finally ready to put their idiocy and cruelty on view. And still no one had thought to keep Lord Harrington in the loop.
Johnson started with the usual waffle. The stuff he needs to tell himself each morning so he can drag himself out of his bed and look in the mirror. Somehow he has to find a way of convincing himself he’s a decent man. Not some lying narcissist who will do and say anything to get him through the day relatively unscathed. So he mumbled something about Britain’s fine history of openness and generosity to refugees.
Er, hello. We took just 9,000 children in the Kindertransport. And only made a big fuss about congratulating ourselves for that because we hadn’t taken any adult Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. And then we made almost no plans to take in any Afghan refugees last year after the US withdrawal and had to hastily scoop up a few thousand interpreters and other key workers at the last moment. And even then we seemed more interested in getting pets out of the country rather than people in fear for their lives. So, not so great. A quick reality check. The UK is the fifth or sixth largest economy and takes just 0.2% of the world’s refugees.
Then the Convict got down to the nitty gritty. He wanted to stop the trade in people trafficking. But he didn’t want to do it by making it easier for people to claim asylum in the country. At present refugees are stuck in a catch-22. They can only claim asylum once they are in the UK but the only way to get here is illegally. Johnson didn’t want to address that. What he proposed was that any asylum seekers – including Ukrainians without a visa – who reached the UK without having been pushed back and drowned while crossing the Channel would be rounded up by the army and given a one-way ticket to Rwanda. Where they could rot while their applications were processed. And if they were cold, wet and frightened then so much the better. Teach them not to come to the UK.
Then things just turned surreal. First, the Convict tried to portray Rwanda as some kind of tropical human rights paradise. Regardless of the fact that it was a dictatorship that the UK had condemned for human rights violations. Then he tried to claim the programme would be a bargain. Ignoring the fact that some Tory MPs had estimated it would be cheaper to put all the refugees up at the Ritz. But he saved the best till last. This was necessary because he was a firm believer in the rule of law. From the man who has shown a spectacular disregard for it since he became prime minister. Keep those fixed-penalty notices coming.
Johnson kept the bullshit going when it came to questions. He merely repeated that he was probably treating refugees with too much kindness. Britain would be overwhelmed with asylum seekers desperate to be interned in Rwanda. Maybe he should try to make the new regime more punitive.
As for his own criminality, he merely smirked and tugged the toddler haircut. If it was all the same, he would fail to answer the questions sometime next week. He’s taking the whole country for mugs. We have a criminal in No 10 and he refuses to explain himself. The Tory wankocracy in overdive, He also said Rishi Sunak was safe in his job. So that means he’s toast. Rishi must be wishing he had the self-worth to resign.
About an hour later, we disappeared through the looking-glass. Here we had Patel, as vicious as she is half-witted, in Kigali. Back in the 60s her parents had fled Uganda. Now she was proposing to send terrified refugees to a neighbouring country whose own citizens seek sanctuary elsewhere. Priti Vacant looked a bit glum as she read out all the positives of the programme, but cheered up when she remembered it was all lies and that the refugees would be banged up in a hostel after all. This was her life’s work and she could die happy.
• This article was amended on 14 April 2022 to correct reference to the decade in which Priti Patel’s parents left Uganda.
