Sketch: Amber Rudd's one hundredth mea culpa for the Windrush Scandal was perhaps the least satisfying of them all

The Home Secretary described the 'tragedy of having to watch' the Windrush scandal, while behind her sat the pensioners who had had to not watch it but live it

Amber Rudd revealed she did not even know about 'net removal targets' in her own department (PA)

If anything good is to come from the Windrush Scandal (or indeed the “Windrush Sadness”, as Amber Rudd bafflingly called it at one point) it could well be a new political TV format.

Sometimes absolutely-bang-to-rights scandals at Westminster can get drowned in procedural complexity, so it was nothing short of ingenious for the Home Affairs Select Committee to seat three victims of the Windrush Abomination, to give its correct name, directly behind the Home Secretary as she spent two miserable hours trying and failing to account for herself and her department.

If ever you got lost for a moment, this elderly trio’s helpfully indignant scowls, their utterly disbelieving shakes of the head, their disdainful flicks of the wrist were all right there to guide you to the correct reaction. It is the kind of stuff Facebook Live has been trying to do with emoji reaction buttons with considerably less success.

In the future, every time a politician has to account for their own catastrophic failings, it should, in my view, be made law that a small handful of those who have had to live with its consequences be positioned behind them to provide real time reaction by way of facial semaphore.

Events began in predictable enough fashion, with what may by now be the government’s 10,000th woefully unsatisfactory mea culpa for its continued victimisation of ethnic minority British pensioners, which it has been told about weekly for at least the last six months, and until very recently done nothing.

“I pay tribute to the individuals, the journalists and campaigners who have brought this to our attention,” Ms Rudd began. This tribute did not go down well in the seats behind her.

“Can I say how tragic it was to watch some of those cases, and repeat how committed I am to deal with them?”

You can if you like Home Secretary, but the tragedy has been rather more keenly felt by the people sitting behind you. These, after all, are the people who have lived that tragedy, as opposed to been forced finally to watch it. And if I were you, I wouldn’t look round right now.

The thing with the Windrush Disgrace, is that there are always more stories to tell. Every single MP seems to have a stash of them in their inbox. Sarah Jones has been the Labour MP for Croydon Central for less than a year and is already, she said, dealing with 450 immigration cases. One of them, she said, involves an elderly lady in her constituency whose home was raided at dawn by ten immigration officers who told her she was going to be deported because she was here illegally, that she would be taken to a detention centre. “She wasn’t here illegally,” Ms Jones explained. “Now she’s been told to get in touch with the Home Office but she’s too scared to do it.”

The faces in the gallery, as ever, said it all.

There then came a series of questions to which, quite bafflingly, neither Ms Rudd, nor the gentleman she had brought along with her, Glynn Williams, the Director General responsible for Borders and Immigration within the Home Office, had any answers.

The Labour MP Stephen Doughty said he had been told by regional immigration officials that, entirely in keeping of the “hostile environment” for immigration of which Theresa May was once so proud, they had “net removal targets” to meet.

That there had been “net removal targets” turned out to be news not only to Amber Rudd, but to the very Director General of the Home Office responsible for them.

“Do you mean a number?” Ms Rudd asked.

“A net removal target would surely mean a number,” Mr Doughty told her.

Both Ms Rudd and Mr Williams said they would “go away and find out”, whether their own department had been setting removal targets, because neither of them were aware.

In their defence, it is perhaps conceivable, and certainly it has never been more conceivable than now, that a net removal target may have nothing to do with a number. Rather a Jamaican-born, British pensioner is declared a target, their photograph is handed to an immigration official, and he then goes and removes them, with a net.

There may once have been a time when the outsourcing of the enforced deportation contract to the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang would come as as a shock, but those days are gone.

Indeed, as the session carried on, Sky News went and found an immigration officer from the Borders Union, who told them that yes the removals targets do exist, and even went so far as to tell them the number - 8,337.

Within a few minutes, this too had been put to the Home Secretary and the Director General of Borders who still “didn’t know” about it.

It is not commonly known that there are actually four original versions of Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, which makes life harder for investigators on the increasingly common occasions on which one of them is stolen. So it may be helpful to put on record that at this point, three of them appeared simultaneously behind Amber Rudd’s head. I saw them with my own eyes, in the Grimond Room of Portcullis House, Westminster, London, shortly after 6pm on Wednesday April 25.

We ended with a warning from Committee Chair, Yvette Cooper, that there are “other crises of a similar nature, coming down the track” on, to take just one example, the treatment of torture victims in detention centres.

Whoever is to blame, the hostile environment for Home Secretaries is just getting started, then. The question is for how long Ms Rudd has a right to remain.