Suella's speech elevates her to global laughing stock

Suella Braverman has tried sending asylum seekers to Rwanda, but so far they’ve taken £120m off her and not taken a single one.

- TOM PECK

She’s tried putting them on a barge off the coast of Dorset, but they had to be taken off again when they found Legionella in the water supply. She’s tried everything she can think of, but nothing’s worked. Which is why all that was left was for her to fly to a very small room in Washington DC, to tell the world that it was making her look very stupid indeed, and so therefore it has to change.

Many people will have found Braverman’s speech on “migration”, with its pantomime cruelty and downright disgusting language, enraging. But mainly it was laughable. Perhaps the biggest laugh came at the end, when the cameras pulled out on this heavily anticipated intervention to reveal what looked like a hotel business centre, and an audience of roughly nine people, each with a giant table to themselves.

Braverman is the most embarrassing element of a government that each day looks noticeably more dead than the day before. It is like one of those David Attenborough timelapse videos of some unfortunate creature rotting away on the forest floor, except that it’s not being sped up. It can all be seen very clearly in real time.

Her boss, the prime minister, chose at the beginning of the year to stake his reputation on “stopping the boats”. It was chosen, clearly, because to do so would be to his electoral advantage. But also chosen incredibly naively, because success is almost entirely beyond his control.