Stupid, illegal, wantonly cruel – and then there’s Boris Johnson’s refugee scheme

There he was, the country’s very first officially criminal prime minister, standing by the Kent shoreline talking about his ‘infinite compassion’

There is absolutely nothing they can do to mask the inherent absurdity of it (Reuters)

A dual launch, then, for the government’s latest bit of witless nonsense. In Kent, we had the criminal. In Kigali, the danger to national security.

We’ll trawl through the tedious and pointless detail of this new “innovative, migration partnership” between the UK and Rwanda shortly (but we’ll point out here that it’s not innovative in any way; the UK is the latest in a long line of countries who’ve tried this ridiculous refugee offshoring crap, and all of them have failed).

But first, we’ll take in the artful majesty of it all. There was Johnson, the country’s very first officially criminal prime minister, standing by the Kent shoreline talking about his “infinite compassion”, in the exact spot where his government had to be talked out of installing high-powered boat-deterring wave machines, once it had been explained to them that they would capsize said boats and kill the people in them.

And there, in Rwanda, was Priti Patel, standing alongside her Rwandan counterpart, praising the “incredibly warm welcome” she had received, while launching a campaign to frighten desperate people with the threat of sending them there.

There is absolutely nothing they can do to mask the inherent absurdity of it. A “new partnership”, launched with great praise for Rwanda. “This modern, dynamic country,” Johnson called it. So modern, so dynamic, so absolutely wonderful that he also hopes the threat of being sent there will stop anyone trying to come to Britain.

Everything he says and does will be wrapped in its own contradictions now. He talked tough on “criminal gangs” but pointedly refused to answer any questions about his own one.

He’s a criminal. There’s a criminal living next door to him. There are at least 80 criminals working in his house. He said he wouldn’t be saying anything on that, but would “update the house next week”.

One of the things Johnson’s going to update the house on is whether or not he’s misled the house. That won’t be worth the paper somebody else has written it on for him, for him to begrudgingly read out.

Patel, when asked, expected the prime minister to be “given credit for apologising”. Righty ho, then. Why do you even need to be shipping these illegal migrants off to Rwanda? Can’t they just hop off the dinghy, shout “I’m sorry!” then head straight to Downing Street and start running the country?

On the radio this morning, Welsh secretary Simon Hart was asked by the BBC’s Mishal Husain: “Why should people stick to legal migration routes when the prime minister himself has acted outside the law?”

Some inaudible noise was mumbled. Do Tory MPs think this is just going to go away? That you really can run a government at the same time as not having the moral authority to tell people they should obey the law?

Life moves in mysterious patterns, doesn’t it. Just over the border from Rwanda, in Uganda, Priti Patel’s parents once boarded a flight to London to build a better life for themselves. They wouldn’t be allowed to do that now, under their own daughter’s immigration system. And just over the border from Uganda, in Kenya, Patel once boarded a flight to London, in order to be sacked for being a danger to national security.

She’d endangered national security by having secret meetings with the Israeli president while on holiday. What was discussed? None of us can know. But it also happens to have been Israel that launched their own “innovative” scheme to deport refugees to Uganda and Rwanda almost a decade ago.

Some 4,000 were sent in total, between 2014 and 2017, and by 2018, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, fully nine of them were still there.

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The rest had smuggled their way back to Europe again, facing immense dangers. Haaretz spoke to six of them, in Kigali. All lived appalling lives. One was homeless. Oh, and it fell apart in 2017 because the Israeli Supreme Court found it to be illegal; a rather awkward little fact of life that Johnson knows a little about.

There are other facts to be found lying about. The one, for example, in which Australia ended up spending £1.7m per person, to find offshore asylum for 3,250 people. The bill ran well into the billions.

It won’t work. It can’t work, for so many reasons that you almost run out of space before even mentioning the pointless return flights to Rwanda brought in by a government still laughably trying to pretend to be the international poster boys on climate change.

It’s stupid, it’s wantonly cruel and it’s highly likely to be found to be illegal. Johnson is launching a entirely legislative version of himself. The only difference being this thing will expire even faster than he does.