Priti Patel is proud of her record – and soon, we might even miss her

Hanging around outside some high-profile drug bust or other in her pretend police uniform, Priti Patel has called in a TV crew to tell them she is “proud of her record”.

And to be fair, she probably is. There is almost certainly no one in the country who doesn’t think Priti Patel’s achievements in life have considerably surpassed her abilities, so it would be naive to think Patel herself is the exception to that rule.

The only point at which you get unstuck is when you try and work out what her achievements actually are. The main one would be getting the job in the first place and then keeping hold of it. Being sacked from the cabinet for endangering national security, as Patel was, is the sort of thing that you would think would prevent a person being promoted a little while later, to a job that puts her nominally in charge of the entire police and border force.

Then, after that, when the adviser whose job it is to assess whether ministers have broken the ministerial code concludes that yes, you have done, that would also be the point at which most people would find themselves writing their letter of resignation. But in her case, Boris Johnson accepted the adviser’s resignation instead. And that, if nothing else, is a record to be proud of.

It’s never been made clear whether she was proud of her idea to install giant wave machines in the Channel to deter migrant boats, because that idea was dismissed when it was pointed out that said machines would capsize the boats and probably kill the people inside them. Most of her public statements on the matter involved having a shouting match with ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s.

Back then, she was also scouring the Earth for some kind of hostile corner that might be prepared to have the UK’s asylum seekers deported to it. Various barely hospitable islands in the middle of various oceans came and went, before the Rwanda plan was conveniently launched the day after Boris Johnson became the first ever prime minister to be formally fined for breaking the law.

Patel, don’t forget, is proud of her record, which must mean she is proud of giving the Rwanda government a £120m downpayment to get going on a policy that, at time of typing, appears to be entirely illegal. When it was launched, it was deliberately sold as using Rwanda as some kind of visa processing centre. It took barely a glance by immigration lawyers for them to work out that it was, in fact, just a straightforward deportation process.

She also reckoned it didn’t matter when Rwanda breezily announced the scheme would take barely more than a few dozen a year. Its main role, apparently, was as a deterrent, so it is especially unfortunate that the day on which she chose to call in the TV cameras and tell them how proud she was of her record was also the day that broke the record for the most number of small boat arrivals in a single day – 1,295.

It has already been pointed out many times over that people who are so desperate to come to Britain that they will not be deterred by the threat of deportation to Rwanda, nor the mile-wide moat of human s*** we have accidentally allowed to be installed around the country, might possibly have something to offer. But that is not Patel’s attitude. She just wants them gone so, on her own terms, it’s hard to conceive how she could have failed more spectacularly.

In a feat of truly unrivalled stupidity, she managed to make her government the enemies of the England football team during a summer in which they almost won a major tournament for the first time in 55 years. English football has always been followed around by a voluble halfwit contingent, who in recent times have expressed their stupidity by booing their own team when they take the knee in solidarity with Black Lives Matter protesters. Patel, for reasons only she can understand, defended the right of England fans to be racist.

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Patel is proud of her record in cutting crime, in “delivering the 20,000 police officers” that were promised at the general election three years ago, even if delivery on that front has not exactly been a runaway success, and even if it were, it would restore only the exact number that successive Conservative governments have cut.

Patel, arguably to her credit, does not get publicly involved in the usual tedious party political matters. She was almost the only cabinet minister to refuse to do any kind of saccharine tweet supporting Dominic Cummings in his journey to Barnard Castle. She mounted no defence for Partygate, for anyone.

It is always said that this is down to the specifics of the role of home secretary, given that these were both police matters. But I’m not so sure. There is no one stopping her from taking a side in the Tory leadership race; that she chooses not to is that she does quite possibly have one significant strength – a decent ear for the intelligence-insulting nonsense that normal people simply don’t want to hear and she therefore doesn’t want to say.

In a couple of weeks, there’ll be a new prime minister who’ll have to decide whether to keep Patel on and, at the current time, the signs are not promising. But, as in all things, be careful what you wish for. The name most regularly heard around Westminster is Suella Braverman. How sobering to think that it won’t be long until we all want her back.