A good photo op

Smooth talking PM Rishi Sunak is in Italy talking to neo-fascists about his wonderful methods for dealing with illegal immigrants. It should be heartening news for right-wingers, since they’re often told that the right, and particularly the hard right are best placed to deal with the problem, not least by packing a few hundred ‘illegals’ off to Rwanda (or in Italy’s case to Albania), all at a huge cost (quarter of a billion so far in the UK’s case without a single deportation). The irony here is that Sunak was telling his fellow nutters that his government this year had already reduced the numbers by one third, through working with foreign law enforcement agencies. It would seem in this regard that, dare I say it, Keir Starmer is right, since he says Labour’s approach is to beef up that approach. Sunak is clearly using Rwanda as a very expensive propaganda tool, a tool plucked from the Tories’ cultural wars armoury. Perhaps he’ll call a general election just as soon as he can get a picture into the Daily Mail of at least one deportee on board a plane to Rwanda. He could go to the airport himself to wave them off, perhaps holding up in the air their deportation paper. That would make a good photo.