‘Failure to launch’ seems to be a growing theme in the Johnson administration

Failure to launch” seems to be a growing theme as the Johnson administration dithers and delays from defeat to humiliation and back again. So too with the Rwanda plan.

This time, the proximate cause was the interim ruling by an out-of-hours judge at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg (characters normally derided as “Euro fat cats” too busy banqueting to do any work). Minutes before the specially chartered flight was due to take off with its remaining handful of pitiful refugees on board, the plane was grounded.

Like the “Tubthumping” song by Chumbawamba, however, when Priti Patel gets knocked down she gets back up again and has already made arrangements for the next ghost flight to Kigali. There is no particular reason to believe that the new cases will be any more lawful, or that the flight (timing TBC) will take off; nor that the judicial review scheduled for next month, or indeed any final review by the ECHR, will find in the home secretary’s favour.

As was perfectly plain from the outset, the actions taken under the partnership agreement with Rwanda were always going to be legally questionable, but Ms Patel and Boris Johnson went ahead anyway. This was for three reasons. First, they must have known that testing the policy in parliament through legislation might prove slow and troublesome.

Second, they fancied their chances in the courts, and were happy to gamble on getting away with it, given a certain judicial trend to move away from challenging the executive. Third, they relished the performative clash with “lefty lawyers” and elitist “enemies of the people” in judges and opposition politicians. It was supposed to be a culture war they could not lose.

Yet it has left them looking incompetent and like losers. The voters might think that controlling migration and abuse of the asylum system is a good idea, but they aren’t that impressed by a government wasting £500,000 on a flight to nowhere, not to mention the £120m the whole Rwanda scheme is due to cost the taxpayer.

The policy won’t “deter” migrants, and it is inconsistent with the principles of universal human rights. The voters tend to judge politicians by results, and Ms Patel is still failing to take control of Britain’s borders. Official human trafficking of refugees to Africa, treating human beings as just so much unwanted cargo, is one thing, but not being able to get a plane off the ground legally adds a new dimension to political idiocy.

Round two of the battle of the Rwanda plan will take place in the courts, and we will soon find out if the forcible resettlement of refugees in Rwanda – even if they’ve been tortured and have an obvious fear for their lives, and have a valid claim – is compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, as enshrined in British law under the 1998 Human Rights Act; and human rights obligations under various UN treaties, again matters of international law that Britain has signed up to.

The question for law-breaking Britain under its law-breaking prime minister is whether it is prepared to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (and even UN treaties) in order to implement the Rwanda plan. As has been well noted, the European Convention on Human Rights long pre-dates the European Union, and is nothing to do with the EU, despite the name. British lawyers, possibly not “lefties”, wrote it, and Britain under Winston Churchill was a prime mover for such a timeless bulwark for human rights, a direct consequence of the horrors visited on Europe in the last world war.

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Now British Conservatives, sovereignty absolutists, wish Britain to withdraw from it, just so the government can do as it wishes. Like every other check and balance in the British system, from the House of Lords and the Queen to neutral news broadcasting and the judicial system, the human rights of the British people are being set aside in the name of the will of the people. It is a drift to an elective dictatorship.

On the assumption that the Conservatives will not be in power under a 1,000-year regime, they might consider how the abolition of human rights might be used by a future government less to their liking. The same goes for the weakening of virtually every other restraint on the powers of the prime minister. In the past, half-forgotten, the Conservatives and other freedom lovers made liberal use of human rights protected by international law to help people who didn’t wish to join a trade union, or felt that their freedom of speech was being limited by socialist governments.

They liked it when the House of Lords defeated Labour bills to nationalise industries, and when the BBC reported on the Iraq “dodgy dossier” under the Blair government. No different from anyone else, people in Britain of every political persuasion, at every place in society, deserve to have their human rights preserved. This week shows just how fragile they are.