Suella Braverman’s Rwanda plan has turned from ‘dream’ to undiluted farce

Shall we start with a bit of background? Last year, Boris Johnson was fined for breaking the law while prime minister, so the next day he went to Dover to launch a new scheme to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. He gave Rwanda a hundred and twenty million quid, without bothering to check whether or not the policy was illegal.

Eighteen months, three prime ministers, four home secretaries (two of which were Suella Braverman), and two court judgments later, the policy is still illegal.

Suella Braverman’s been there to have her picture taken. No asylum seekers have been sent there. There is no prospect that any ever will. And even if they were, it would make no difference whatsoever to the problem it is nominally designed to solve, namely “stopping the boats”.

It is regularly suggested that the policy was intended to be a farce, to create something to argue about, rather than do anything about. But if that was the case, it is hard to imagine anyone foresaw the sheer scale of farce, its multilayered absurdity which puts anything in Catch-22 entirely to shame.

Your entry-level farce was that, having paid Rwanda £120m to receive a maximum of 200 asylum seekers a year (the real number, of course, being zero), or roughly half the number that have been arriving daily for the last month, the point of the policy, in fact, had to be about “deterrent”.

But also, the government has to pretend that Rwanda is a lovely place to go, a great place to build a life, but also simultaneously that nobody would ever be so stupid as to come to Britain in a dinghy to get there.

On Thursday morning, a High Court judgment ruled that it wasn’t safe to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. That it has an appalling human rights record, and also that there were no protections in place to prevent the Rwandan government re-deporting its British small boat-based asylum seekers somewhere else.

To the House of Commons then, where Suella Braverman expressed her grave disappointment that the High Court has declared her policy illegal because they agree with her. That nobody in their right mind would ever risk being sent to Rwanda.

She didn’t agree; of course she didn’t. It is, as she once declared, her “dream” and “obsession” to see a flight take off from British aerospace bound for Rwanda. And so she insisted, as she always does, that “Rwanda is a safe and vibrant country, with a growing economy”. That you’d be mad not to want to go there but also that no one in their right mind would ever take the chance of ending up there.

She invoked, at least 20 times, the “British people”.

“The British people will be disappointed by this judgment.” There is, very obviously, no evidence whatsoever that the British people will be disappointed that a performatively cruel and very obviously illegal policy has been called exactly that by the High Court.

The British people, by and large, are exhausted and bored by pantomime schemes with which the High Court has unsurprisingly declined to provide assistance.

There is a possibility that the judgment will be overturned by the Supreme Court, and that the first deportation flight to Rwanda could happen in time for next year’s election. It’s hard to know how to analyse that.

Pictures of that plane lifting off from the tarmac would be a rolling advert for Britain’s abandonment of any claim to being a civilised, modern, forward-looking, decent country.

Evidently they think this is what the British people want to see. I for one have my doubts.