Heard the one about how much the Rwanda plan has cost so far…?

The government has spent £290m sending three home secretaries to Rwanda, but not a single asylum seeker. And the joke’s on us, says Sean O’Grady

Former home secretary Suella Braverman during her fact-finding visit to Rwanda (Stefan Rousseau/PA) (PA Wire)

If it were not all so depressing, the Rwanda plan to deport asylum seekers might make for a jolly sort of Christmas carol.

“On the last day of Christmas, the Tories gave to me… Three hundred million wasted; a hundred thousand crossing the Channel; 13 years in office; eight Home Secretaries; three visiting Kigali; two Rwanda treaties; and not a single deported refugeeeeee”.

The only real dividend of the Rwanda plan is to provide an endless source of grim comedy gold with which Keir Starmer can torment the prime minister every Wednesday lunchtime at PMQs.

For a man that Boris Johnson used to call “a useless bollard”, Starmer has perfected a line in dry wit that visibly irritates Sunak – but it is the prime minister’s failures that have provided Starmer with his satirical material.

These are easy lols for Starmer: “I am not actually sure the prime minister can have read this thing. Article 4 says the scheme is capped at Rwanda’s capacity – that is 100. Article 5 says Rwanda can turn them away if it wants. Article 19 says we actually have to take refugees from Rwanda. How much did this ‘fantastic’ deal cost us?”

Sunak’s subsequent peeved, petulant reactions only highlight the problems, sadly self-generated, that he finds himself in. To mix metaphors, Sunak doubles down when he’d be most wise to stop digging when already in a sizeable hole.

Starmer’s jibes work because Sunak’s own colleagues (or enemies) on the benches behind him know they are true. The fact is that the current capacity of the scheme is 100 persons, despite frequent ministerial claims that is “uncapped”, which is true only in the sense that my ability to win the lottery is uncapped. Sadly, Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick are correct in pointing out why the latest version of the scheme won’t work – though their alternative is even less practical.

It is also correct, as the leader of the opposition mockingly points out, that more home secretaries (three) have visited Rwanda than refugees (nil) since Priti Patel and Johnson hatched the bizarre plan in April 2022. Let’s hope their inflight meals were worth it!

Since then, the Home Office has been cagey about the amount of taxpayers’ money expended on it, and adamantly stuck to a figure of £140m; requests for an update were resisted. The civil service seems to have advised ministers that this reticence about public money is no longer sustainable, and so we now learn that some £240m in total has been spaffed on this daft, unworkable scheme so far, with another £50m to come.

It is a substantial sum to be wasting on a gimmick that, because it will only ever affect 100 people, and can never act as a deterrent, let alone a solution to the problem. In the unlikely event that a planeload of a hundred pitiable refugees ever does take off for Kigali, it will mean the process will have cost Britain some £2.9m each.

We’d be better off just giving them the cash and telling them to start their own business empires, as immigrants sometimes do. Or, more to the point, letting them stay and spending the money on building houses for all of us who need them – because the British housing shortage long predates the migrant crisis.

Indeed – controversial point, here – it might be better all round of we allowed the Albanians to carry on working on the building sites so many of them are rumoured to head for, instead of sending them home.

Dominic Cummings, who takes an interest in numbers, adds that probably more refugees from Rwanda will enter the UK, lawfully, under the treaty signed by James Cleverly than will be sent to the African state in the coming years. Somehow, the British will have contrived to spend hundreds of millions of pounds to create a kind of balance of payments deficit in refugees with Rwanda.

The only question is: when will the joke end?