We were having dinner on holiday in Turkey last year, when the British couple at the next table started complaining how difficult the Covid regulations made it to return to the UK. “Be Syrian refugees!” advised the restaurant manager with a cheeky grin. Plenty of Turks he knew had travelled to the French coast, cut up their documents and credit cards and taken a small boat to England. Many were now happily working for their uncles in Tottenham.

Relatives in London, the manager explained, sent money back to their village in the Kurdish part of Turkey. Their nephews used the cash to pay the people smugglers for passage from Turkey to Greece, then, via France, by dinghy to England. And Ahmet’s your uncle!

Once the Turkish lads landed at Dover, they would claim their free smartphone and tell border officials they were persecuted Sunni Muslims from Syria. Even some of the North Africans now claimed they were Syrian so they’d improve their chances of being granted leave to stay.

The manager’s enthusiasm for this ruse was so infectious that, amidst our laughter, we forgot it was our own country that was the butt of the joke.

Quite clearly, the 600 people who scrambled ashore at Dungeness and Dover on Wednesday had not all decided to masquerade as desperate people from Aleppo. But, equally, not all 600 are the “vulnerable” asylum seekers cited by the refugee agencies who have been wailing on the airwaves since we learnt that “Priti Vicious” (as one newspaper called her) plans to send single, male asylum seekers on a one-way flight to Rwanda.

“I mean, how could that ghastly woman show so little compassion?”

Perhaps the Home Secretary has, unfashionably, decided to show some compassion for her own people? You know, the ones who are picking up a bill of around £5 million every day to keep migrants in hotel accommodation. I don’t think I lack compassion when I say I’d rather that vast sum of money went towards, say, food vouchers for some of the under-privileged British children who will lose out from the cost of living crisis.

The Left, who believe they have the monopoly on caring, don’t care that the £1.8 billion we spend accommodating migrants who entered the UK illegally would pay the salary of 50,000 nurses for a year. Well, they should care.

We desperately need more nurses. And those migrants, who pay thousands to get here, queue jump women and children patiently waiting their turn in Jordanian refugee camps. That’s what I call unethical.

Sanctimonious critics of the Government point out that sending migrants to Rwanda will cost us a fortune. Yes, it will. But not for long. Wait and see how keen economic migrants, who just want a comfier existence in the UK, are to claim asylum in a benefit-free country a few degrees south of the Equator. The deterrent effect will stop the boats, as Australia found when it moved its own migrant processing offshore.

By all accounts, Priti Patel has been working into the small hours during the Ukraine crisis, trying to whip a sclerotic Home Office into action and “personally stitching together the entire online digital process” so shell-shocked refugees can take up the wonderfully kind offers of help from the British people.

Exhausted, frustrated and horribly reviled, the Home Secretary is nonetheless willing to grasp the nettle now to stop the “revolting”, multi-million-pound, cross-Channel trade and to break the business model of the people smugglers. She knows those vultures have been turning to ever more dangerous and un-seaworthy boats to improve their profit margins. How is it “humanitarian” to allow people to go on drowning?

While her boss, the Prime Minister, will get the credit from Conservative voters who support this radical policy, the woman who has done all the work will get the flak (even though the silent majority agrees with her). I hope she’s prepared for the abuse from the Guardianistas who will screech, “Guantanamo Bay!” the minute six Turkish lads (sorry, Syrians) are billeted in a rather nice Kigali apartment block.

These are hard times, and they’re about to get a lot harder. There is strength, not shame, in refusing to be a soft touch.

Our own people are going to need all the compassion they can get. Under the circumstances, being prepared to see through tough decisions is laudable.

Actually, I’d call it Priti Amazing.