We knew things were serious, because the Prime Minister had unleashed his trademark “reading things out” voice. Gone were the avian gobbling noises that usually punctuate his delivery (“Bah! Uhhh! Buh! Bleargh!” – like a turkey with a 40-a-day smoking habit.) Instead, as he unveiled his new plan for dealing with Channel migrants, the PM tried to sound as reasonable as possible; solemn, statesmanlike, cruel to be kind, harsh but fair – in direct contrast to the wackiness of the scheme.
Praising Britain as a “beacon of openness and generosity”, he cited historic migration flows ranging from French Huguenots and Jewish refugees from Tsarist Russia, to a rather more rogue choice for a Tory PM to invoke – “the docking of the Empire Windrush”. Yet again he evoked the Johnsonian lodestars, “Our NHS and Our welfare state”, and the “unmanageable demands” placed on them by Channel crossings.
Admittedly Rwanda as offshore processing centre of choice seemed like a bit of a coin-toss; what was left when the random country generator had finished whirring. I half-wondered if the policy had been devised by rifling through some old DVDs Rishi had left behind in the No 11 flat. The Grand Budapest Hotel was out – try getting Viktor Orban to sign up to that. Hotel California and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel were presumably a no-go too, with their unfortunate echoes of green cards and non-dom status. So all that was left was Hotel Rwanda.
The hand of the random word generator lay heavily on the PM’s speech too. It was even more alliterative than usual, as if hurriedly written with a single dictionary page open for reference. He promised “to identify, intercept and investigate” small boats, and bragged of his “innovative approach”. (More obvious ‘i’ words such as “impractical”, “illogical”, “or even “insane”, hadn’t made the cut.)
Some of the assembled reporters pooh-poohed the proposals with lashings of Amnesty International-style sanctimoniousness. But the PM’s misdemeanours were of far greater interest. Almost every question majored on ‘partygate’, with any Hotel Rwanda queries belatedly tacked on as an afterthought.
“A quick question because I’m not patient enough to wait,” snapped Anushka Asthana of ITV. Would the PM be correcting the record about his lockdown rule-breaking before his return to the Commons next week? Many reporters posed versions of this question; all were disappointed. “Anushka, forgive me you’ll have to wait,” replied the PM, exuding crocodile regret.
Over in the Rwandan capital Kigali shortly afterwards, the Home Secretary was holding a press conference alongside Rwanda’s foreign affairs minister Vincent Biruta. She looked a picture of serenity as she set out the policy, in impeccable hang ’em and flog ’em tones – devouring phrases like “evil people smugglers and their criminal gangs, profiteering and facilitating…”
“For too long other countries – and by the way, naysayers – just sit on their hands, and have been watching people die,” she intoned triumphantly, savouring these words with a faintly curled lip.
Many commentators seemed keen to condemn the scheme as originating from the dead cat school of thought. “Anything to deflect from those lockdown parties,” sneered Guy Verhofstadt on Twitter. A smirking Sir Keir Starmer branded it “a desperate announcement from a Prime Minister who just wants to distract from his own lawbreaking”.
But perhaps the PM had hit on something when anticipating his critics’ complaints earlier on in his speech. “To those who object, I say ‘We have a plan. What is your alternative?’” he’d concluded. In the face of an apparently intractable problem, voters might prefer a something – however unworkable – to the nothing currently on offer from the opposition.
