Stop being so hard on Theresa May – we all make mistakes. Some of us spill lemonade, others accidentally deport people

Theresa May said she’s sorry her government upset the children that came on the Windrush, so we should accept that. It was an accident and we all make them. Some of us knock over a glass of lemonade, and some of us accidentally spend 10 years yelling that we must drastically reduce the number of immigrants as they’re taking our jobs and benefits while boasting our policies will create a “hostile environment” for them and whoops-a-daisy; you accidentally make an environment that’s hostile to them.

When she was home secretary, the prime minister accidentally sent vans round the streets with the words “Go home or face arrest” written on them, directed at immigrants, and no one could have guessed this would lead to an unwelcoming atmosphere towards immigrants in which some people might feel that immigrants ought to go home or face arrest.

It wasn’t the government’s fault that people who’d lived here for 50 years were suddenly threatened with deportation. It was an unlucky coincidence that at exactly the same time as the “hostile environment” policy, all round the country lots of immigration officials accidentally all became heartless, insisting they should produce papers they never had in the first place.

You can hardly blame immigration officials for threatening deportation to people who have lived here since they were seven if these people haven’t even bothered to keep their documents neatly in a folder marked “Papers that never existed”. Some people just ask for trouble.

One account from this story is that of Albert Thompson, who as a result of being unable to provide documentary evidence that had never existed to prove he’d lived here for 44 years was made unable to work, was evicted and was denied treatment for cancer.

You can understand why, because government policy was that immigrants were coming here to claim benefits, so the government would be tough and stop them getting those benefits and receiving free healthcare. But that policy becomes difficult when immigrants are working, so the best way out of this difficulty is to take away Albert Thompson’s right to work, so that he has to claim benefits, then he can be denied them and told he can’t be treated for cancer. After all, why should immigrants be allowed to come here and stop our government from carrying out their policies, just because the government’s policies are based on made-up b*****ks?

In any case, the Home Office can be excused for believing they were illegal immigrants, as there’s no way of checking whether someone’s lying about having lived here for 50 years. You can ask the neighbours but they might have been hypnotised. You can check their driving license and work record and medical records and bank statements and gym membership and library tickets and credit payments for a washing machine, but they’ve probably all been forged by Vladimir Putin, so it’s far more reliable to assume they’re lying and make them move to Barbados.

Several victims of this policy were told they couldn’t leave the country to attend the funeral of a relative. The government would surely have defended this on the grounds that they might try to smuggle their dead relative back so their spirit could take the jobs of British ghosts.

After all, this was a government that every day tried desperately to respond to what they saw as growing anti-immigration feeling in the country by promising to drastically reduce immigration, and begging immigration departments to be as ruthless as possible in removing any immigrants without every document they were asked for.

I wonder if this, deep down, made some people in the immigration departments feel under a tiny bit of pressure to be a little bit more forceful towards immigrants in any way. There’s no way of knowing without consulting a psychotherapist, I suppose.

At one point, the government produced handbooks for people they were deporting. The one for people sent to Jamaica advised that when they arrived in Jamaica they should “try to be Jamaican, use local accents and dialects”.

This shows how skilful the government was at telling whether someone was an illegal immigrant. Less adept people might assume that if you have to tell someone to speak “Jamaican” as they didn’t sound in the slightest bit Jamaican, this might indicate the person isn’t all that Jamaican. But luckily Theresa May’s Home Office could see right through that trick.

This is a highly efficient method for reducing immigration, and the Home Office should do this to everyone. They could knock on random doors in Barking, informing everyone that they’re Zambian, then send them to Zambia with advice to start speaking Zambian and support a Zambian team instead of West Ham. And within a couple of years they could reduce the population to nought.

Maybe what’s happened is the government thought the mood was all one-way – that austerity and cutting benefits and moaning about immigrants was and always would be popular enough to keep them in power for decades – and now they realise that might not be true. So in several areas, they’re now having to explain away the cruelty of their first seven years in power as a clerical error.

But we should probably be gracious, and accept the prime minister’s apology. To start with, this was all a long time ago. She defended the decision to deny Albert Thompson’s cancer treatment as far back as March, almost a month ago, when times and attitudes were different.

Then, having forgiven her, we should accept the word of any arsonist who says: “I apologise enormously for the fires that seem to have taken place under my policy of burning things down. I have no idea how this can have happened, but I assure you I’m doing all I can to get to the bottom of all those smouldering public buildings. What a shame. I’m shocked, I tell you: shocked.”