Picking on people in boats is easy for those who find politics difficult

Back in April, eight months and three prime ministers ago, Boris Johnson received a fine for breaking his own Covid laws and the next day he washed up in Dover, announcing a plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. (For the sake of historical completeness, we may wish to add that alongside him was Priti Patel, four home secretaries ago, two of whom were and indeed are the same person, after the current one resigned and was reappointed within a week.)

Picking on the boat people is easy politics for those who are finding politics rather difficult. And Rishi Sunak (who was also fined for breaking his own Covid laws, but no one seems to care very much about that) has decided it is his turn.

On Tuesday afternoon, he swept in to the House of Commons to announce new laws that he reckons will make it easier to send those arriving on small boats straight back to where they came from, by which he means Albania, even though the place they’ve very clearly come from is France.

And he’s also announced an exciting target for when it will be done: the end of 2023. By this point, he says, there’ll be no backlog of asylum seeker applications, because he’s going to start processing them all very quickly indeed, mainly by ignoring what’s actually in them.

It’s been pointed out that this is arguably quite naive. To make yourself a massive target, on an issue that is becoming ever more politically toxic, and make the deadline for that target several months before a general election.

He must have a master plan, mustn’t he? He must have a grand strategy? Because he can’t seriously think he’s going to waft a simple idea in the direction of this massively complex problem and actually make it go away? It won’t go away. He must surely realise that the barriers people arriving in boats have already scaled in order to make it to Dover in a rubber dinghy are rather more difficult than anything he can place in their way beyond that point.

He must be aware that the real answers lie in international reform of asylum law, complicated negotiations with France, neither of which he is likely to achieve even if he wanted to, which he doesn’t.

He’s not really just giving in to the mad right wingers in his party, is he? Telling them more of what he thinks they want to hear, in lieu of actually doing anything, then hoping his big 1-month deadline will just quietly slink away, which it won’t?

Well, who knows, frankly. Maybe he is. It is decidedly possible that Rishi Sunak really is as naive as all that. Traditionally, when someone becomes prime minister, it is wise to believe there is more nous there than might meet the eye. In Sunak’s case, however, he became chancellor because the last guy refused to serve under the conditions he accepted. Then he became rather popular mainly for subsidising Big Macs. And then – and this is the big one – he lost the race to actually become Tory party leader, to Liz Truss.

In that race, you may recall, he allowed himself to be filmed bragging about taking money from deprived areas and sending it to Tunbridge Wells. He now likes to imagine he lost the race because he was brave enough to tell people things they didn’t want to hear, but he also promised to make it even harder to build new houses, and to reduce the basic rate of income tax to 16 per cent.

Rishi Sunak will have to perform a miracle to still be prime minister in two years’ time. Cutting income tax, eliminating the asylum seeker backlog and finding some magic way to kick everyone out in a timely fashion would be miracles. Whether Mr Sunak manages to perform three miracles, or none, we shall just have to wait and see. But one suspects the people waiting to board the boats at Calais have already made up their minds.