Face it, Rishi, you can’t bribe every asylum seeker with £3,000 and a free house

You may remember that a couple of years ago, the then home secretary Suella Braverman, sounding like a breathless teen at a Taylor Swift concert, declared that: “I would love to have a front page of the Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda, that’s my dream, it’s my obsession … [doing so by Christmas 2022] would be amazing, but if I’m honest I think it will take longer. We’ve got to come out of the legal dispute we are currently embroiled in.”

She was right about the last bit – but you can’t help thinking that our beleaguered prime minister, facing ritual humiliation in the local elections, might also have found a bit of publicity about the Rwanda scheme quite a useful boost to his increasingly incredible claims that he “has a plan”. One that works, that is.

Yet now, despite finally sending the first long-awaited flight to Rwanda on Monday evening (and with it, its solitary migrant passenger), there is no picture of the failed asylum seeker on the front of the Telegraph – or anywhere else, for that matter. It is the first time the UK government has ever relocated a failed asylum seeker to a third country – and yet the world’s TV crews weren’t invited to the historic event. There are no TikToks of the guy being bundled on board. Where is the pomp? The ceremony?

Imagine how many worried Tory councillors and disgruntled Tory MPs and members might have found joy in such a moment. For Braverman, it would have been an early Christmas present. Why did Rishi Sunak and James Cleverly (presumably) restrict news of their coup to a leak to the Sun? Why so shy?

To be fair to the Sun, the tell-tale word “voluntary” features quite high up in the story, which gives the game away. Significant as it might be, this is not the Rwanda plan in action. It’s more something that looks like the Rwanda plan in action, with all the essential ingredients – failed refugee, plane, pilot, airstrip. But it’s not.

It turns out to be that the unnamed bloke who was out on the plane wasn’t in fact anything like a forced deportation of the kind envisaged by the Rwanda plan, but one who went quite voluntarily. Had they invited the media to witness the proceedings, they might have found not some wretched soul struggling to get free like he was headed to the gallows, but a chirpy chap with a spring in his step whistling “the sun has got his hat on” as he looks forward to the in-flight entertainment. It may not have been his choice for a new life, because obviously the UK was – but he’s been persuaded that a sojourn in Rwanda at the expense of the British taxpayer is an agreeable second best.

He was bribed – there’s no more apt word – with £3,000, possibly already in handy packs of Rwandan francs, and when he gets to Kigali he’ll get free board and lodgings for five years, courtesy of HM Treasury. What happens at the end of that time can take care of itself, he may reckon. He might even try to get to the UK again. Who knows?

What we do know is that this simulacrum isn’t convincing anybody. But even if it were, and even if the token flights take off in the coming weeks, it is all too late not only for the local elections, but for the general election as well.

The voters remain mostly of the view that the Rwanda plan is a bit of a gimmick, which of course it was and is. It was devised by Priti Patel, once inexplicably home secretary, and Boris Johnson (ditto as PM), to show that they were doing something – anything – about the small boats, and to try and shut Nigel Farage and the Tory right up about it. It came from the same creative minds in the home office that thought giant wave machines in the English Channel might do the trick (without capsizing ferries and fishing boats).

Reportedly, Patel suggested intercepting the dinghies with “armoured jet skis” might be a job for Border Force, whence the unfortunates would be dumped on oil rigs, or that Napoleonic-era concrete island fort which launched pirate radio in the 1960s. It was all bonkers, but somehow the Rwanda scheme, and the Bibby Stockholm barge, made it into reality as showcases for the world-famous British talent for fine public administration.

In any case, the press is being kept well away from this pioneering failed asylum seeker in Kigali, because any interviews he grants might be a bit embarrassing for all concerned. So far from the Rwanda plan – or at least this version of it – being a deterrent to travel to the UK, it’s more like a ruse to win a sizeable wad of cash and a pleasant stay in your own place while you ponder what to do with the rest of your life.

Indeed, the fees he could have charged for “exclusive” interviews and Hello!-style features on his new-build maisonette would easily have dwarfed the payments he’s already down to get. It’s not really the image that Sunak wants for his Rwanda plan, because it would make it look silly. And, according to some odd political rumours circulating in the past few days, Labour will either abolish it, or inherit it and try and make it work (eg by actually making Rwanda safe, rather than just pretending it is).

Either way, Keir Starmer will get whatever electoral benefit there is to be gained from the future of the Rwanda project, after Sunak has gone through all the trouble and pain of establishing it. You can’t help but feel the irony is thoroughly deserved.