Be thankful for small mercies. At least the Post Office and Fujitsu weren’t run by Conservative MPs. If they had been, then most of the post office operators would have been deported to Rwanda years back. Throw away the keys. Sayonara, motherfuckers. Fujitsu and the Post Office were merely serially incompetent and institutionally corrupt. The Tory party can trump this by adding totally deranged to its achievements.
Nothing illustrates the continuing meltdown of the Conservatives better than the Rwanda bill. The obsession with persisting with a scheme that you know is never going to work. That will send, at most, 200 unfortunate people to Africa. A scheme that ignores the findings of the supreme court that Rwanda is an unsafe country. That depends on bailing out of international treaties. That will put the UK on a par with Russia and Belarus. Happy days.
But we are where we are. Locked into an ongoing psychodrama that is just a national embarrassment to the rest of us who are mere onlookers. Just think of the nonsense we are being expected to believe. Only a few weeks ago Chris Skidmore was denounced by Tories as a traitor to the cause for resigning as an MP because the party was reneging on its climate crisis promises. Now we’ve got about 60 backbenchers – plus bandwagon followers Lee Anderson and Brendan Clarke-Smith – who are proclaiming themselves heroes for rebelling against the government.
Go figure. We are now so far through the looking-glass we are into an entirely unknown universe. One where morality has been suspended. All we are asked to do is to put our faith in the great minds of our day. Great minds, like – checks with therapist – Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick, Bill Cash, Simon Clarke and Edward Leigh. AKA five of the biggest halfwits you could hope to meet. An unhealthy mix of the dead and the undead.
But this is where we are. “We’ve got to honour our promises to our constituents,” say the Feeble Five. “We’ve done a poll that says: ‘Do you want loads of foreigners coming here and murdering our children in their beds?’ And they definitely don’t want that.” But the idea they might actually fulfil other promises they have made – I don’t know, things like fixing the NHS, mending schools and caring about the cost of living – hasn’t crossed their minds. Those were promises never intended to be kept, apparently. Second order promises.
This all being a crock of shit, it was inevitable that the Chief Pig would make an appearance. Step forward Boris Johnson, who declared himself fully behind anyone who was causing trouble for Rishi Sunak. Bizarrely the Convict also insisted that immigration was the biggest scourge of our day. The same Johnson who cheerfully welcomed 600,000 immigrants a year while he was prime minister and now had it in for the 30,000 refugees who arrived in small boats. The Tories really must imagine the country is as stupid as they are.
That wasn’t the end of it. To keep the rebels onside – no one was quite sure why; it wasn’t as if any of them had a gameplan because bringing down the government and forcing a general election where most of them would be out of a job was hardly an option – Sunak came up with the sort of rubbish that even the Post Office would reject as idiotic. Like magicking up 150 judges out of nowhere to deal with the Rwanda challenges. Like promising to break international law but only whispering it in case Rwanda somehow happened to be listening. The Tories have yet to discover the internet.
But the show must go on, so the committee stage of the Rwanda bill duly got started in the Commons at lunchtime on Tuesday. After a brief ramble from the SNP’s Alison “Everything’s Terrible” Thewliss, “Honest Bob” Jenrick got to his feet to put one of his amendments. He thought he was making history.
Something weird has happened to Honest Bob. Not just the weight loss and the sharp new haircut. Rather he’s started to take himself incredibly seriously. He’s moved on from being the bit-part bag-carrier helping out Tory pornographers to thinking he’s a genuine player. He now sees himself as the Future. A leader-in-waiting. But he has all the gravitas of a deluded schoolboy. Someone who mistook polite applause for an unwanted speech at a Young Conservatives conference 20 years ago for a standing ovation.
We were lucky to have someone like him, insisted Honest Bob. He could understand things that were beyond the comprehension of the little people. His was a truth only available to the incredibly dim. Rwanda was safe because we had said it was safe. That was a given. What he wanted was the legal freedom to redefine reality in whatever way he liked.
Honest Bob added in a few other countries he didn’t much like. Lawyers that bothered to apply the law were unpatriotic lefties. Care4Calais was dismissed with a sneer. He really couldn’t understand why people might actually waste time on refugees. They were lowlifes. An underclass not worthy of the attention of a Brit.
“Rwanda wants this scheme to work,” he said. Well, yes and no. Even Rwanda has its limits. One of them being international law. They quite like that. And they are twitchy about threats to break it. Also, it’s money for old rope as it is. Who wouldn’t pocket £400m for being asked to do precisely nothing? The government can send me three home secretaries for that. But Honest Bob was adamant. Now was the time for a futile gesture.
Next up was the superannuated Bill Cash. He still can’t believe we aren’t still fighting the last world war. The refugee problem is all Germany’s fault. Them and the EU. It was as though the Brexit debates had never ended. He was a Brit, so he had a God-given right to do what he wanted. The supreme court was full of Trots. He’s never met a refugee he didn’t want to drown. Honest Bob nodded approvingly.
That just left Edward Leigh. The idiot’s idiot. A man who makes Cash look like an intellectual giant. Any fool could make a claim that Rwanda was unsafe, he said. And it must be stopped. You just had to tweet that the president was a dictator. Then you’d be locked up for life. Er … yes. That’s precisely the point. Rwanda is unsafe. You can call Sunak a mindless clown and no one bats an eyelid.
All the while, the handful of opposition MPs just looked on in amazement. Was this really a party of government? These just weren’t serious people. Rats in a sack. The amendments were going nowhere. And we would all be back tomorrow for more.
