Rishi Sunak is in thrall to just two syllables: small boats. Plunging wages, extortionate heating bills, collapsing public services – such trivia does not detain the UK’s first Goldman Sachs prime minister from his Peloton. But small boats crossing the Channel? These he will vow to stop, fulminating in speeches, plastering the words across his lectern as if in a deadly pandemic.

To pull it off, he is yet again this week burning through his dwindling political capital, just like those tech venture capitalists he adores. So he’s declaring Rwanda safe for refugees – which, according to our supreme court, is like claiming black is white – while handing Rwanda hundreds of millions of pounds (its president was yesterday promising a refund). Our chief lawmaker promised this week to break international law and to strip asylum seekers of court protection – or, as he termed it, “the legal merry-go-round”.

Denying the wronged their rights is how the British establishment created the Post Office scandal – but no matter! Nothing is too bad for those fleeing broken countries and risking their lives to come here. Team Sunak tells us it is “illegal immigration”, even though government statistics show three out of four asylum seekers win refugee status or some other legal protection. Tories claim that foreigners steal Britons’ social housing, even though the biggest culprit for that is their own handbag-wielding deity, Margaret Thatcher, whose right-to-buy scheme stripped England of more than 2 million council houses.

Over the past half-decade, the government has manufactured a full-blown moral panic over refugees. First the Conservatives denied most........

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