It’s Christmas next week – Suella Braverman better get a move on

‘A front page of The Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda. That’s my dream. That’s my obsession,’ she announced in September, a few days before being told to resign and then getting her job back anyway

There is, inevitably, a grim irony that a boat should capsize and people should die in the Channel, the morning after the government vowed, yet again, to do something about it.

It’s eight months since Boris Johnson made a meaningless, cynical promise to send them all to Rwanda. It’s barely hours since Rishi Sunak made some vague promises to change legislation to make it easier to deport the people that arrive in boats.

He surely knows it won’t work. Surely he doesn’t think that, well, they’re still coming now, but just as soon as my new legislation takes effect, that will be that.

You would think they might understand a little more about the human condition. It is not yet five months since the Conservative Party held a leadership contest in which, as a statement of fact, to be white was to be an ethnic minority. It is even less time since great fanfare was made about almost all but one of the great offices of state being occupied by people of colour.

Pundits pondered at great length over how it came to be that it was the Conservatives, not Labour, who had so clearly won the diversity race. That right-wing ideas, right-wing values, might appear to have more appeal to migrant populations and their descendants who are, broadly speaking, less economically fortunate.

But there’s nothing shocking or surprising about it at all. It is hardly a surprise that the men and women who had the courage to up and leave home seven decades ago or more, and come to where they believed the opportunities were, have now nurtured new generations who think the world is there to be seized and they will seize it. That life is what you, the individual, makes of it.

And yet, Sunak, Braverman and the rest don’t seem to have the courage to articulate what’s really going on. To take a risk to improve your lot in life is what human beings do. Lucky people take risks by leaving their law firm to set up on their own. Or they jack in a steady job for a six month maternity contract somewhere better, backing themselves to convince their new employers to take them on permanently in the end.

People who are less lucky in life take different risks. They suffer a grim few hours on a boat in the Channel, knowing full well the awful risk, because on the other side they know someone who’s going to give them a job, or simply because they speak the language.

A seemingly miraculous rescue operation in the freezing dawn appears to have saved 43 lives, while four were lost. Even had there been not one survivor, more packed dinghies would still be pushing out to sea the next morning, its occupants just hoping that it won’t happen to them, that their odds, by and large, are in their favour.

You would hope that they would know better than to reduce these people’s lives to debating points they know are wrong. Braverman had to give a statement to the House of Commons, (the first, I think I’m right in saying, that did not concern her own resignation and reappointment.)

“Our capacity in this country is not infinite. We cannot accept everyone who wishes to come here,” she said. “Although the Labour Party would suggest otherwise.”

She probably knows the Labour Party has never said any such thing. All they’ve done is patiently try to point out that the problem won’t be solved by cruel words as a displacement activity for actual politics.

It’s Christmas next week, which means Braverman has only got a few days left to make her “dream come true”.

“A front page of The Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda. That’s my dream. That’s my obsession,” she announced in September, a few days before being told to resign and then getting her job back anyway.

Of course, she and others are right to say that these people are being exploited by people smugglers, but they’re being exploited by exceptionally low-grade politicians too, who think their little lives are the stuff through which they can make their dreams come true, when their dreams are so small they amount to nothing more than a bit of favourable news coverage of an act of unimaginative cruelty.