Sometimes I could almost feel sorry for David Cameron, at others he just engenders in me a sense of profound exasperation.
This is the author of Project Fear, the campaign dreamed up by him and George Osborne to dissuade the British People from voting Brexit.
It was going to be a big economic disaster: there would have to be an immediate emergency austerity budget but there wasn’t.
Unemployment would rocket overnight but it didn’t. Our standing in the world would collapse and that didn’t happen either.
“Perhaps Cameron would like to tell us just how many were returned to France before Brexit”
PA/Getty
In private they probably predicted that they could thus scare the populace into voting yes, but they couldn’t.
One might have thought that eight years after the referendum in which the people voted for sovereignty and four years after Brexit allegedly happened, he might have got over his wild rantings as completely as he once had to get over his membership of the wild Bullingdon Club at Oxford, but no, there he was this week blaming Brexit for the legion of migrants braving the channel to land on our shores.
It is of course quite true that while we were members of the EU we theoretically benefitted from the Dublin Convention which allowed us, equally theoretically, to return asylum claimants to the safe country from which they came to our shores but in practice it just did not happen on any scale and thus provided no deterrent at all.
Perhaps Cameron would like to tell us just how many were returned to France before Brexit.
Deterrence is the name of the game and I have no doubt that if we ever manage to despatch significant numbers of illegal migrants to Rwandan climes, that will put a lot of people off crossing the channel and might mean that France has to deal with the problem instead of snaffling our money and waving the boats off.
“Since 1999 I have advocated a policy of universal detention for all new asylum seekers in secure reception centres instead of allowing them to come and go at will”
PA
Unfortunately, there is and never has been any plan B. So while Sunak has been posturing over Rwanda, thousands of illegal migrants have flooded onto our coast to be housed in hotels at enormous public expense.
The attraction of Britain over France is easy enough to discern: we have no national identity cards, we do not practise detention and we have a flourishing underground economy, so the message goes out that once you get into Britain you are very unlikely to be removed. It is just too easy to disappear.
Since 1999 I have advocated a policy of universal detention for all new asylum seekers in secure reception centres instead of allowing them to come and go at will.
That would enable us to assess their cases more quickly and we would know where they were when it came to returning them.
When we made an agreement with Albania to take their nationals back, there was a dramatic drop in claimants from that country.
As I say, the objective is a real deterrent. If we had been doing that while waiting for the Rwanda scheme to materialise we would have seemed a much less attractive proposition to the average economic migrant, willing and able to pay the people smugglers.
Meanwhile back to Brexit. When we left the EU we were the world’s seventh largest exporter.
Now we are the fourth. We have trade deals including the Trans Pacific Partnership which involves huge players such as the USA, Japan, Australia and Canada, which we could not have entered while still in the EU.
No, we have not yet got Singapore on Thames but we could have if the country were to be more imaginatively led.
So, David Cameron, as Foreign Secretary, what about praising Brexit and revelling in its opportunities?
