The farce of the ‘floating prison’ barge should be a serious lesson to Rishi Sunak

The Tories’ performative cruelty hasn’t won them any new voters, writes Tom Peck – nobody wants to see asylum seekers marched on and off a floating prison, pursued by bacterial infection

Legionnaires’ disease was detected in the onboard water supply of the Bibby Stockholm (PA)

When Rishi Sunak a) decided to stake his reputation on an absurd policy that was never going to work and was almost certainly illegal, then b) put Suella Braverman in charge of it and then c) decided to make it the focus of the nation’s attention for a full week – namely “small boats week” – he probably should have foreseen that it would end badly.

But how badly? At this point, it is reasonable to ask whether, actually, maybe it could have been worse. The Bibby Stockholm has not sunk with all its static passengers still on board (though it is not altogether easy to work out whether Braverman and co would have considered that a good or a bad outcome).

The whole thing serves no purpose beyond pantomime cruelty. Who of us can say, with any certainty, how cruel Suella Braverman really is? She thinks nothing, after all, of smiling a little smile and wistfully talking of her “dream” of seeing a plane full of asylum seekers deported to Rwanda on the front pages of The Daily Telegraph. If these are the dreams she’s happy to speak so longingly about in public, what are her private ones? Please, don’t dwell on that for long. It’s not pleasant.

No, all that’s actually happened, at the end of a week in which the government had to admit that almost no one on board its ridiculous barge actually even arrived by small boat, is that said barge has been evacuated after Legionnaires’ disease was detected in the onboard water supply. It’s not clear how it got there. I can’t confess to knowing where barges get their water supply. Maybe there was some kind of mix-up. Another farcical incident in the extended Mr Bean episode that is our current administration.

This is, to be clear, a separate public health catastrophe from the one they warned about and also ignored. That was about a potential passenger having tuberculosis but being told to go on board anyway.

At the time of typing, the Bibby Stockholm, a 222-capacity barge on to which the government has bragged of its intention to squeeze 500 passengers (a brag that has caused it to be disowned by the Fire Brigade, resulting in the Fire Brigade being called “woke” in response) has no passengers.

Its success as a “deterrent” is also somewhat in question, given at least 750 people arrived in small boats during small boats week itself – so many that attempts just to keep track of them have caused a £420,000 Home Office surveillance drone to crash and drown in the Channel.

And the Tory loon brigade is now agitating to pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights, in the hope that that might allow the country to deport a maximum of 200 people a year to Rwanda, a privilege for which £120m has already been paid – for absolutely no reason.

But, you know, maybe it’s all worked out just fine. Maybe it’s taught Rishi Sunak a lesson. Namely, that the people he’s trying to placate cannot be placated. That the whole point of what he’s doing is to make cruel and nasty people think that he is one of them, but the trouble is, they’re crueller and nastier than he realised and that has consequences. Already the Daily Mail has been publishing iPhone footage from on board the vessel, and recoiling in horror at the fact that said people are being provided with meals of “meat, eggs and cheese”. All this, says Mail columnist Amanda Platell, while 4.2 million British children live in poverty.

There are so very many reasons why the Conservatives are so hopelessly screwed, but none more so than that some have been reduced to wanting to starve more people so that it’s fair on their other victims.

The electoral marketplace for performative cruelty simply isn’t as big as Rishi Sunak had hoped. There is, actually, no one who wants to see asylum seekers marched on and off a floating prison, pursued by bacterial infection. That sort of thing is just a straight-up farce, of the kind that absolutely everybody is extremely bored with.