The moment Suella Braverman became a global laughing stock

Suella Braverman has tried sending asylum seekers to Rwanda, but so far they’ve taken £120m off her and not taken a single one.

She’s tried putting them on a barge off the coast of Dorset, but they had to be taken off again when they found Legionella in the water supply.

She’s tried everything she can think of, but nothing’s worked.

Which is why all that was left was for her to fly to a very small room in Washington DC, to tell the world that it was making her look very stupid indeed, and so therefore it has to change.

Many people will have found Braverman’s speech on “migration”, with its pantomime cruelty and downright disgusting language, enraging. But mainly it was laughable.

Perhaps the biggest laugh came at the end, when the cameras pulled out on this heavily anticipated intervention to reveal what looked like a hotel business centre, and an audience of roughly nine people, each with a giant table to themselves.

Braverman is the most embarrassing element of a government that each day looks noticeably more dead than the day before. It is like one of those David Attenborough timelapse videos of some unfortunate creature rotting away on the forest floor, except that it’s not being sped up. It can all be seen very clearly in real time.

Her boss, the prime minister, chose at the beginning of the year to stake his reputation on “stopping the boats”. It was chosen, clearly, because to do so would be to his electoral advantage. But also chosen incredibly naively, because success is almost entirely beyond his control.

And this is where it leads. Specifically, to a home secretary who is never happier than when issuing softly spoken proclamations about her own capacity for cruelty, standing in front of a world that absolutely does not care what she thinks, or even know who she is, and telling it that it has to change.

She was here to tell the world that “the global asylum framework” has to change. She was telling this to nine people who looked like they walked into the wrong seminar at a chartered accountants convention and were too polite to leave.

She was announcing that the only way she and Rishi Sunak can dig themselves out of their little hole is if the entire world changes all of its agreed rules on migration and asylum – and hoping the world maybe wouldn’t notice that both of them were predictably passionate devotees of walking away from Britain’s position of influence on the world stage, as it did seven years ago.

She was here to say that, from now on, asylum seekers should have to apply for asylum in the first safe country they reach. And if they don’t? Well, this woman you’ve never heard of, who’ll be out of government in a year, to be replaced by someone who avowedly disagrees with absolutely everything she’s got to say, will be very, very annoyed.

“Policies of externalisation, such as our policy with Rwanda, must be recognised,” she said. To which the only question to ask back is: “Or what?”

What is going to happen? What, exactly, is Suella Braverman going to do?

She said that, from now on, asylum seekers shouldn’t be allowed to “shop around for their preferred destination”. That the global asylum system, as it currently exists, incentivises migrants to, in her own words, “try their luck”.

One of the people who’ve “tried their luck” in recent years is an Afghan man who was in fear for his own life in his own country through having assisted Nato forces when they were fighting there, but after the US and UK pulled out and the Taliban returned, discovered there were no legal routes through which he could apply for asylum in the UK. He “tried his luck”, and it ended at the bottom of the Channel.

She spoke of such people, and she said that “none of them have good cause for illegal entry”. As if risking your life to assist British forces is not good cause to hope that that country might treat you better than, say, France, if you can just somehow make it there.

It hardly needs to be stated that the world isn’t going to change its ways in accordance with the wishes of a British government that has spent the best part of a decade turning itself into an international embarrassment.

Nor does it need to be stated that such events have more than one intention. This one, mainly, is quite rightly interpreted as the beginning of Braverman’s leadership bid. It’s hard to say whether it got off to a bad start, as it can only be compared to her last one. And that was when she went on ITV to tell Robert Peston that she was “throwing my hat in the ring” in the Tory party leadership contest, even though it hadn’t actually started not merely because the prime minister, Boris Johnson, hadn’t resigned, but also because neither had she.

For those of us who make a living taking the mickey out of politics, naturally, we wish Suella Braverman every success with her future leadership intentions. If she wins, she’ll find she’s got a very difficult job on her hands, but mine will be extremely easy.

As for her party, eventually it will work out, just like David Cameron and George Osborne did almost 20 years ago, that you can’t turn your back on liberal, metropolitan values and expect to get anywhere. That hasn’t changed. It never will. It’s just a case of how much longer they need to work it out, and how much worse things can get in the meantime.