Jimmy Dimly lines up with the post-truth brigade

This wasn’t how it was meant to be. This wasn’t his best life. It should have been him, not Lord Big Dave, who commandeered the private plane for a surprise visit to Ukraine. It should have been him who got the photo op of a handshake with President Zelenskiy. He was good at all that PR bollocks. Standing around with the great and the good while never really saying anything. The perfect job for a man of little brain.

Instead he had been shifted to the Home Office bunker. Expected to actually do something while working with the batshit and the flatliners. In all probability a career-ending move.

It was a decidedly grumpy James Cleverly, then, who headed out on the morning media round to try to explain the government’s latest Rwanda plan. Still, at least he had the slam dunk that was guaranteed to win the next election. First stop was the Today studio at the BBC.

“Good morning,” said Amol Rajan.

“If you say so,” replied Jimmy Dimly. Rocking the passive aggression.

“OK. So the government has lost its supreme court appeal and yet the prime minister has given a press conference saying he’s got a brilliant plan to start the deportation flights in the spring. If it’s so brilliant, why didn’t you avoid wasting time and millions of pounds in legal fees and do this a year ago?”

Jimmy D sighed. It was like this. The supreme court had actually decided in the government’s favour. This is what so many people, including the judges, had failed to realise. The court had found Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman to have been totally within their rights to send foreigners wherever they wanted. He knew this because the government had some of the finest minds at work on this.

“Er … yes,” said Rajan. “But they’ve also had Sunak’s, Suella’s, Lord Big Dave’s and … yours.”

Silence as Jimmy D took that in. Dead air. Amol tried to retrack to first principles. Was the point not that Rwanda had been deemed an unsafe country? It had an unfortunate track record of shooting refugees it didn’t like. It didn’t hold free and fair elections.

Its courts and judiciary were not fit for purpose. It had been found guilty of sending death squads into the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He could go on.

“Oh,” laughed Dimly. There was that. But why should any of that be a hindrance? Because what the UK government was going to do was sign a treaty with Rwanda, in which its president, Paul Kagame, said he would do his best to behave but couldn’t promise there wouldn’t be the odd relapse. But what was the odd bit of recreational torture between friends?

Then – and here was the really cunning bit – Rishi would get parliament to pass a law saying that Rwanda was “Really free, really free, really really really really free, kick me”, which would totally confuse the supreme court into silence. And the kicker was the killer clause which would say: “This law is the most important law in the universe, so that means it is recognised as absolute by every intergalactic judiciary. So no one will be able to challenge it anywhere. All European and international courts will be abolished.”

Rajan sounded understandably confused. What the government was proposing was to pass a law saying that Rwanda was a safe country regardless of whether it complied with any legal definitions of what a safe country was.

“Absolutely,” chirped Jimmy D. That was the whole point. Rishi had uncovered the secret of government. Any uncomfortable truths could just be airbrushed out of history by an act of parliament. If you didn’t like something, you could make a law to suit your own version of events. There was no longer such a thing as truth. Just post-truth.

The supreme court had actually decided in the government’s favour. This is what so many, including the judges, had failed to realise