When facts get in its way, this government resorts to fiction

As James Cleverly adopts an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ approach to defending the unlawful and unworkable Rwanda plan, the Conservatives have gone through the looking glass... again, says Sean O’Grady

The new home secretary, James Cleverly (Getty)

And now we can join the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, where Alice is interviewing the new home secretary, the Right Honourable Humpty Dumpty MP. They’re discussing the rationale for a proposed new law, which states that there are now only 364 days in a year, and Dumpty is in the middle of an answer. Sort of...

“As I was saying, that seems to be done right – though I haven’t time to look it over thoroughly just now – and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents –

“Certainly,” said Alice.

“And only one for birthday presents, you know. There’s glory for you!”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory’,” Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t – till I tell you. I meant: ‘There’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”

“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean a ‘nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”

Every so often, a government gets itself into such a mess that the only thing left available is to go through the looking-glass and adopt an alternative reality, where words and concepts may be redefined at will.

So it is with the Rwanda plan, and James Cleverly’s actual defence of it to the actual Amol Rajan on the actual Today programme.

In a testy performance worthy of Humpty, Cleverly insisted that if the British parliament passes a law that says that Rwanda is safe, then it jolly well is safe. “Safe” means what Cleverly and Rishi Sunak choose it to mean, neither more nor less.

It doesn’t matter what the Supreme Court says it means, even if their ruling on the Rwanda plan was amply supported by the facts and by established legal principles. Nor does Humpty Cleverly care that the former Supreme Court judge Lord Sumption, himself someone whose name sounds like something out of Lewis Carroll, declares that this approach is “profoundly discreditable”.

As Sumption explains so eloquently: “If the courts are told that they’ve got to pretend that Rwanda is safe, whether it is or not, then that will work domestically. But it won’t work internationally.

“It will still be a breach of the government’s international law obligations. It will be a breach of the refugee treaty. It will be a breach of the rules of customary international law, which the government has been promoting and saying covers this obligation for some years. It would be constitutionally a completely extraordinary thing to do, to effectively overrule a decision on the facts, on the evidence, by the highest court in the land.”

But then again, perhaps not so extraordinary, because it has happened so often and, it has to be said, the bad habit was greatly extended by Boris Johnson, author of so many of our misfortunes as well as his own.

To take another example with constitutional significance, Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and others persuaded the Queen that the prorogation of parliament in the autumn of 2019 was perfectly proper and normal, whereas it was, as another Supreme Court ruled, an attempt to bypass parliament and effectively rule by decree to “get Brexit done”. Her Majesty had no choice in the matter, and in the modern world couldn’t just shout: “Off with his head!”

Johnson did the Humpty Dumpty thing again during the whole Partygate fiasco, where a “party” meant exactly what he wanted it to mean, which was that it’s never a party when he’s present or knows about it. The old charlatan even changed the meaning of the word “no” – and we can be precise here – when at Prime Minister’s Questions on 28 April 2021 he was asked by Keir Starmer whether he had ever said he would rather have “bodies pile high” than implement another lockdown: “Can the prime minister tell the House categorically, yes or no: did he make those remarks, or remarks to that effect?”

To which Johnson replied, “No.” We now know, from the explicit testimony given to the Covid-19 inquiry by close aides, that the answer should have been “Yes.”

Much the same reinvention of the world as it is was attempted by Liz Truss in her disastrous experiment with the public finances – defeated by a “left-wing” establishment according to her; or sabotaged by “shadowy” money men in the conspiratorial, looking-glass world of Nadine Dorries, where facts are grotesquely contorted to fit into her all-encompassing, phantasmagorical “plot”.

Sunak, supposedly such a rational technocrat, even resorted to making up “illustrative” projects to replace the cancelled HS2 line to Manchester.

Of course, politicians have always sought to persuade the public that round pegs fit into square holes and that black is white, and often they’ve succeeded. Eventually, though, like Humpty Dumpty, their credibility wears thin, they have a great fall, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put them back together again.

At 19 per cent in the polls, the Tories look a bit unsteady up there on their red wall. There’s glory for you.