Don’t tell her, but Suella has stumbled upon an immigration winner

The Conservatives have a sensible policy on immigration, it’s just that they’re incapable of having a sensible conversation about it, writes Tom Peck

The home secretary is very good at saying what the public want her to be talking about, but not so good at actually talking about it (EPA)

Shall we cast our minds back to the Year of Our Lord 2016? And lo! Who has appeared, in the pages of the Daily Express? “‘Immigration swells UK population by size of Newcastle every YEAR,’ says Boris Johnson”.

About 350,000 a year it was, back then. It’s easy to forget, because there was another big number doing the rounds at the time, which also began with 350 and also turned out to be complete b*****ks.

“So what do we do about it?” Johnson wondered. Well, that’s easy. We “take back control”. So we did. And yet, somehow, seven years later, Newcastle has been upgraded to Glasgow.

The new number, announced this morning, is 606,000. And it’s a number that, frankly, British politics is not programmed to cope with.

It doesn’t really matter that it has shown Brexit, yet again, to have been an entirely pointless exercise of which there is absolutely no upside to be found anywhere. The vast majority of British people already know that. They’ve just stopped caring. They can’t face doing anything about it, and neither of the main parties can face it either, so that’s that.

Also, according to every poll carried out in the last seven years, the public have stopped caring very much about immigration. They can see that it is good for the economy, the NHS, and every other facet of British public life. They can see that migrants pay more in tax than they claim in benefits; and also – and this is the big one – unlike actual born-and-bred Brits, once they’ve stopped working, they tend to go home again.

They don’t retire here, racking up massive healthcare bills for the younger and much poorer generation to cover. And nor do they commit, more or less en masse, other huge acts of economic vandalism like, say, voting for Brexit.

The home secretary has spent all of this week saying that the public don’t care about her attempts to work her way out of doing the same speed-awareness course as everybody else. She says they care about what she is doing on immigration; what she is doing to “stop the boats”.

And yet, for some reason, on the day the vast number came out, not a word has been heard from her. She is, it transpires, very good at saying what the public want her to be talking about, but not so good at actually talking about it.

There are, naturally, a variety of normal ways in which someone in her position could respond. They could say, for example, that 150,000 of the 600,000 are Ukrainian refugees, some are Afghan refugees, and some are Hongkongers taking advantage of their visa rights, which were extended in the wake of a Chinese crackdown there.

They could say that a large proportion comprises students coming to British universities, to enrich those institutions and also make them cheaper for British students.

These would be normal, rational responses to a policy that benefits Britain.

But the trouble is, if you’re a Tory, then you can’t say those things. It’s been 13 years since David Cameron promised to bring net migration down to the “tens of thousands”. Last week, the cabinet secretary under Cameron, Gus O’Donnell, said in a panel event that when he advised the then prime minister on the ways he might make that happen – like, say, leaving the EU – Cameron replied: “Don’t be daft. It’s an announcement, don’t get carried away.”

It wasn’t “just an announcement” to Theresa May, who devoted six full years as home secretary and three as prime minister to a futile attempt to deliver on a promise Cameron didn’t actually care about and knew was meaningless.

And her chief of staff at the time, Nick Timothy, also wrote last week of Boris Johnson’s promise in the 2019 manifesto that “overall numbers will come down”. And that having published the manifesto, the former PM called round his ministers and told them not to repeat the line because he disagreed with it.

And this is precisely how you end up where we are. Which is to say, being governed by a party that’s capable of a sensible policy on immigration, but not capable of a sensible conversation on it. That is entirely content to let the numbers rise and rise and rise, while promising repeatedly to bring them down, on the calculation that the ever-shrinking band of voters who care about immigration will always trust them more than Labour to do something about it, even after more than a decade of the opposite being true.

They can make politics out of the pantomime cruelty, by sending Suella Braverman to Rwanda to have her picture taken next to some buildings that might one day theoretically have room for 140 of the 606,000 net migrants a year, for a down payment of £120m that’s already been paid in full even though the policy is illegal.

But they can’t possibly deliver on the big promise, because – quite rightly – they don’t actually want to. They just can’t admit it.